Stage-to-screen review: Death of England: Closing Time

The show I was due to see tonight got cancelled at the last minute, so I replaced it with another show that I'd missed the first time, and that I'd been keeping in my back pocket for just such an occasion: I had a ticket to Death of England: Closing Time's premiere at the Dorfman in 2023, but my performance got cancelled when Jo Martin fell ill. I wasn't too worried about missing the latest part of Clint Dyer and Roy Williams' increasingly epic project as I knew it would turn up on NTatHome sooner or later, which it now has: It played in rep as part of a trilogy (the made-for-TV Face to Face seems to have been quietly forgotten) that played in rep last year at @sohoplace, the theatre with a name so current it's working on a gag about what "Zig-A-Zig-Ah" means that it'll find a punchline for any day now.

Theatre review: Death of England - Delroy

Back what was either five minutes or about twelve years ago depending on how time is passing, Clint Dyer and Roy Williams​' Death of England was a hit in the National's Dorfman; a major part of the conflicted, grieving Michael's monologue revolved around his black best friend Delroy, and the way his father treated him. Like everyone else in that story, Delroy got an unfiltered taste of how Michael felt about him in an eventful, coke-fuelled eulogy, but he also ended up hooking up with his lifelong crush, Michael's sister Carly. Although the original monologue was powerful and self-contained, it did also effectively set up its unseen supporting cast of characters enough that Rufus Norris commissioned a companion piece soon after it opened. The resulting sequel/spin-off Death of England - Delroy hasn't had the best of luck - original star Giles Terera got appendicitis but his hand-picked understudy Michael Balogun has ably taken over; only for the NT's post-lockdown return to fall victim to Lockdown 2: Here We Go Again, meaning tonight's official opening is also its closing night (it was filmed so people who'd booked for a cancelled performance can be offered a digital alternative.)

Theatre review: Death of England

The National Theatre's website notes that Death of England opening at the Dorfman makes its co-writer and director Clint Dyer the first black British artist to have worked on its stages as actor, writer and director. It's worthy of mention but more significant, it seems to me, although probably harder to quantify in terms of firsts, is that Dyer and Roy Williams are two black British writers telling a story specifically about white Englishness in such a high-profile venue. In a frenzied tragicomic monologue Rafe Spall plays Michael, an Essex flower-seller whose father dies on his shoulder in the pub, keeling over suddenly when England get knocked out of the 2018 World Cup by Croatia. Fuelled by grief, alcohol and cocaine he tries to reconcile his feelings of loss with his deep-held disgust at his father's racism and increasing flirtation with the far right.

Theatre review: I Call My Brothers

Once again theatre feels like the medium responding the fastest to worrying trends around the world, with a Swedish play touching on the rise of a far-right party to power in that country, but more so on the way this sentiment trickles down to the man on the street. In Jonas Hassen Khemiri's I Call My Brothers, that man is Amor (Richard Sumitro,) an Asian man in his twenties who's out clubbing on a Saturday night when a car bomb, soon to be attributed to an Islamic terrorist, goes off in downtown Stockholm. We follow Amor over the next 24 hours as he goes into town to do chores, chatting to friends and family members on the phone. The more the day goes on the more he feels targeted and under suspicion by the police and the public, but whether he's really being looked at differently or is imagining it might be up for debate.