There was a terrible poignancy to the press night of Death of England: Delroy. The sense of occasion was tremendous. The Covid precautions were elaborate, reassuring, almost majestic: as if spectators were being guided into a faraway country with unfamiliar customs. The huge Olivier auditorium – impressively reconfigured to make a theatre in the round, with the audience given ample space, looked like a gigantic chessboard, with grey wooden tables blocking off some seats. Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’s new play had been scheduled to mark the reopening of the National Theatre after seven months of darkness. It turned out to be ushering in another closure. Its first night was its last.
Yet hold on: this is not the end. The press night performance was filmed (a last-minute decision) and will be able to be viewed in due course. What’s more, that “death” in the title is, well, ambiguous. The play begins fuelled by fury, but it ends in unexpected hope.
The story of Delroy is a companion piece to Dyer and Williams’s earlier Death of England, staged in February, which starred Rafe Spall as angry Michael – flailing, white, working-class. Delroy, who is black, is Michael’s best friend and the boyfriend of Michael’s sister Carly. He too is angry, with plenty of provocation. He is wrongly accused and roughly treated by police. He is betrayed by Michael, who tells him: “You might sound like us, but you will never be one of us.” Carly seems to turn against him. He is gripped by a hostile system, but he does not march; he works as a bailiff and is a Brexiter. He is eloquent, but does not speak the language of courts and cops. Ultz’s confrontational design is a black cross, above which dangle an outsize golliwog and pink balloons spelling “GIRL”.
Michael Balogun – originally the understudy for Giles Terera, who is undergoing surgery – projects distress in torrents of words and forceful movement: he is coiled, ready to punch back against a punching world, but also bunched up against himself, like a curled-in boxing glove. Yet he twists naturally into lightness. He and his partner flirt and bicker enjoyably on their phones. And they have a child. Here is the hope. This new family is a cause of emotion but also a practical arrangement. It is “a fact” that helps to change – begins to help to change – the land of his birth. The death that is glimpsed here is that of an old England in which every Sunday is an Othering Sunday. That would be a welcome demise.
Chichester Festival theatre, too, opened briefly for live performances (and, after the lockdown struck, livestreaming of performances behind closed doors for cameras only) of Sarah Kane’s 1998 play Crave. I am not invariably bowled over by Kane’s desolate fragments of dialogue, meshing startling directness with allusions to TS Eliot and biblical quotation, but she is an undeniable inspiration to directors and designers. Tinuke Craig’s production made the variations and repetitions of Kane’s exchanges ring out like bells. Alex Lowde’s design captured a memorable image of striving and frustration. Four striking actors – Erin Doherty, Alfred Enoch, Wendy Kweh and Jonathan Slinger – pacing side by side on moving walkways; striding forwards but sliding backwards; all facing the same way, yet with no chance of meeting.
Hannah Chissick’s assured direction of Little Wars proves how strongly a streamed reading can register. Steven Carl McCasland’s 2014 play imagines a meeting in 1940s France between Agatha Christie, Muriel Gardiner, Lillian Hellman, Gertrude Stein, Alice B Toklas and Toklas’s German Jewish maid. The plot hinges on Gardiner’s anti-fascist activities, which Hellman supposedly co-opted in a book that became the 1977 film Julia; the script is sharp, with a good joke about a hat in the closet, though Hellman’s devil’s-advocate arguments are too flimsy and Stein’s Pétainist-leaning politics are flattered.
There are exceptional performances. Juliet Stevenson, a hatchet-faced but not altogether flint-hearted Hellman, proves how good she is at conveying the qualities of which she is least often suspected: insincerity and nastiness. Meanwhile, Linda Bassett pulls off something remarkable. With a few bold strokes – some owl-like glances over her specs, a dirty chuckle, implacable cheeks – she makes Stein seem, well, not exactly natural, but authentic. A pose is a pose is a pose? Not here.
These women – threatened by various plagues of prejudice – speak longingly of a time after the Nazis, when normality may have changed and daily life might be more generous and expansive. The hope of 60 years ago echoes ours.
Star ratings (out of five)
Death of England ★★★★
Crave ★★★
Little Wars ★★★★
