Review: DEATH OF ENGLAND: DELROY, @sohoplace

I noted the jaw drop of an audience member opposite me the moment Paapa Essiedu exploded into the light. His jaw was still drooping, cavernous, at the final blackout an hour and a half later. Some actors can play a role. Sure. Only a handful can inhabit it living and breathing. Even fewer are so convincing that you can’t imagine anyone else in their shoes. Paapa Essiedu is the latter. Without a doubt. Not even a second of doubt.

He leads a one-man cavalry charge of a production for the second part of Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’s Death of England trilogy, collected in rep together at @sohoplace (yep it’s still called that). But he is so utterly chameleonic that you forget it is a one man show.

Following on from Michael, the perspective shifts to his childhood friend Delroy as their families intertwine across generations. These are weighty plays about big hefty things, the scars of racism, the sharpening blades of nationalism on the rise. But love and tenderness are the threads tying the two families together: Roy Williams and Clint Dyer, who also directs, never take their eyes off the human heart beating beneath it all.

Delroy is falsely arrested the day his girlfriend, Michael’s sister Carly, is to give birth. A surge of breathless emotion rushes as he recounts it: the pain of racism, lifelong, seeped deep into the flesh, and the joy of new life, a new generation emerging into a new world. It’s bittersweet – but the bitterness is intolerable, and the sweetness is soul-nourishing. Terrible beauty.

You can feel emotion bleed from every fraught gesticulation. The Eric Cantona swagger crowned with a hyper masculine scowl crumbles into the melancholic fear of a vulnerable child. You can see it in the pinpricks that crawl up his arms. The sprinkle of tear shudder from his whirring eyes.

Essiedu really is a force of nature. Totally at ease, working the audience like a stand-up comic, then, with fox-like agility, backstabbing them with guttural force and working up to a symphonic crescendo.

For Michael I noted that Dyer and Williams’s brilliance as writers lies in the way they delicately coil loving intimacy into the character’s DNA. Not matter how tempestuous the storm clouds of paranoia and hate are, a ray of light can always shine through. Watching Essiedu find that light is breath taking.

Death of England: Delroy plays at @sohoplace until 28 September 

Death of England: Michael plays @sohoplace until 28 September. Read our review here.

Photo Credits: Helen Murray 

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