Theatre Review: Death of England
Photography by Hellen Murrary
Kayleigh Lau reviews Death of England, one of the last highlights of the National Theatre's interrupted 2019-2020 season.
“Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”. But in the wake of Brexit, what precisely is dead and what is left behind? In the post-referendum era, a divided nation increasingly turns to art to fill that gulf of understanding, and Roy Williams and Clint Dyer’s Death of England is yet another rousing, rending addition to this canon.
The play takes the form of an extended, wandering monologue delivered by Rafe Spall’s Michael, whose life story only seems like a pitiful archetype: twice-divorced, bouncing from job to job, supporting a losing football team. However, this present outburst we see on stage is first and foremost a kind of eulogy, in response to his father’s sudden death during the England-Croatia semifinals of the 2018 World Cup. The whole play, therefore, is a working through of a complex father-son relationship, one with a working-class father who ran a small flower stand for all of his life and spitefully champions an “England for the English”. Personal loss – and love, deep down – conflicts with a deeply uncomfortable reappraisal of his father’s true legacy, and the state of the things, or children, he leaves behind.
At its intellectual core, the play shows a broader examination of the subtle, festering racism in the white working-class experience, and this is inextricably couched in the story of Michael’s family like nesting dolls. The family drama is thus the very human shell for current political ones. For Michael’s father, there is always a rightful “time and place” for racism: never at the flower stall, in order to avoid alienating customers, but always at the football games or the voting booth. Racism is then that bitter inheritance passed down from father to son: during the explosive funeral scene, Michael interrupts his racist tirade against his Caribbean friend Delroy, his sister, and the funeral guests with disclaimers – “Those are dad’s words”. But the voice of the father beyond the grave becomes increasingly indistinguishable from that of the son. A play firmly of this contemporary era, the script later nods to the headlines and figures that define the political moment – Me Too, Trump and Tommy Robinson (Michael finds these in his father’s search history – examining the polarizing effects of their discourse on the personal, ordinary lives surrounding them.
For a play about death and grieving, Death of England greets us with a manic, hoarse energy right off the bat. In Michael’s reckoning with grief, he first turns to alcohol, petty fights and drugs before the words finally come, allowing him to un-bottle a lifetime of repressed emotion in the space of 100 minutes. Even then, it is a percussive rage as he bounces around every corner of the stage, assumes the voices of the dead man and his flawed family, and punctuates every word with spit and sweat. Right from the first minute Rafe Spall puts on a masterclass in the role, taking us from breathless confusion and anger, to wounded vulnerability and finally childlike heartbreak – all with a direct, stage-filling physicality.
Even though the play begins almost too rapidly, with all of Michael’s speech blending into one and leaving the audience scrambling to latch on to a word, it eventually settles into a sobering intensity. The play’s true emotional heart lies in its second act and the unexpected sequence following his father’s funeral ceremony, showing that his father might have more nuance and self-reflection than he revealed before his death, however tentative or incomplete this character development is. Above all, Death of England parallels this microcosm of personal legacy with the national legacy: with the death of his father’s old “English” certainties, what does Michael really believe in now? In the end, there is nothing left but to “find our own way now”, in a lonelier, new world.
Like Michael, his father is merely a man desperately attempting to seek answers in a world that seems to pass him by, even if he comes to find these answers in darker, angrier places. Above all, this sympathy and projection is a hallmark of the play – as Michael tries to understand his father and the audience tries to understand them both. This is even more evident in light of the fact that the whole play is crafted through the lens of its black playwrights Williams and Dyer. With Death of England, Dyer becomes the first black man to have directed, written and performed at the National Theatre, and his examination of white identity might otherwise seem subversive and stinging. But, far from condemning its white working-class characters, the play inhabits their lives with consideration and generosity. In the post-Brexit age, Death of England peels away that personal and national stoicism to reveal the bitterness and loss beneath it, and forces us to confront that emotion at last.