Review: DEATH OF ENGLAND: MICHAEL, @sohoplace

The guns fire loud and sonorous for the opening salvos of Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’s Death of England trilogy. A staggered premiere over four years at The National Theatre from 2020, new kid on the theatreland block @sohoplace (it’s really called that) have collated the trilogy (Michael, Delroy, and Closing Time) in rep in the West End.

What a master stroke. Like curating paintings in an exhibition where only together do the whole themes emerge as one picture ebbing and flowing across time, through characters, perspectives, lives.

Without a doubt they are state of the nation plays. The stage is a luminous St George’s Cross, almost blood red – so the political symbolism is obvious enough. But this triptych is no finger wagging polemic. It’s one gut punch after another. A left jab of funny and right hook of furious in equally dazzling parts. You are gloriously unsure if the next line is a punch line or a rallying cry.

We start with Michael, a white working-class East Londoner whose identity spirals into alienation after the death of his racism spewing father. How to separate the father’s palimpsestic hatred from the love that is buried deep? Here’s the brilliant twist: that generational inheritance is stratified across a national scale. In a way we are all Michael, all inheriting a toxic past that we must collectively disentangle.

Meltdowns and arguments erupt, viscous lava spewed in the form of acidic hatred targeted at Carly (his sister who takes the stage in Closing Time) and racist outbursts directed at his childhood friend Delroy (who takes the stage in the second part). Only a visit from a stranger reveals a tender side to the father he once feared. Even the nastiest are capable of self-awareness, regrowth, healing.

I can’t not applaud Thomas Coombes’ performance as Michael – the role demands marathon stamina and his energy is in full pungent flow. But his unmodulated firing-on-all-cylinders-attack-from-all-sides method results in a scorched earth rather than a clinical strike and clean kill.

In fairness the role demands fireworks. The dramatic tension clenches into a veinous fist when Michael delivers a eulogy for his dead father – whose casket portentously emerges from the stage draped in a Union Jack, tongue-in-cheek prowess on full display from production designers ULTZ and Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey.

The cocaine-fuelled outpouring is as much a therapy session for him as it is a cathartic middle finger to his father. But without moments of tenderness we grow deaf to the overwrought barrage of shouting and swearing and are left feeling that it is longer than it needs to be.

Dyer and Williams’ brilliance as writers lies in the way they delicately coil intimacy into Michael’s soul. As much as boiling hated bubbles, he cannot overcome the love that hangs around his neck like a millstone. Coombes’ happy-go-lucky blokey demeanour delivers the knuckle fisted punches, but not all the blows land.

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

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

Photo Credits: Helen Murray

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