It’s strange to look at the huge Death of England monologues last week week. First we began to glimpse – I think – the country’s rebirth, then, after Southport, we saw the underground horrors. Originally shown separately at the National four years ago, the first two parts of Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’ trilogy (the third follows in August) flicker on stage as dark reminders, warnings – and glorious celebrations of acting prowess.
Less like plays than like tumults incarnate, Michael And Delroy would be valuable as accounts of the divisions and despair made painfully clear – or more talked about – in the wake of Brexit and the pandemic. Yet they are more than chronicles. These dramatic portrayals of the lives of two young men from Leyton, east London, whose friendship is beset and threatened by racism – one is black, the other white – twist and turn unpredictably: is this racist, flower-selling father who he seems? And, most importantly, they are expressed richly: where else would anyone hear a few eyes rolling behind them?
The intensity is undiminished: both plays would benefit from a 15-minute tuck. Yet Dyer’s production is dynamic, aided by the clarity and drive of the design, by Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey and Ultz. Two platforms cross to form a St George’s Cross – at one point the red carpeting is ripped up and distributed among the audience. Crucial objects are arranged around the stage like installations or offerings in a mausoleum: boxing gloves, a cameo from Britannia, funeral white flowers spelling out “DAD”.
Ever since I admired him as he made his way through Barbarians nine years ago I wanted to see Thomas Coombes on stage again: he was snatched away by television (last in Baby reindeer). He is magnificent as Michael, the white boy whose father dies watching England lose at football (the script takes into account the most recent defeat), and delivers his 100-minute speech as a convulsive one. He roars and shudders constantly, as if waves of anger and bewilderment were rushing through him in words. Paapa Essiedu, in a more sympathetic role as Delroy, is a wonderful combination of force and insinuation, gliding through degrees of bewilderment and outrage, both candid and subtle. Both use the stage as stand-ups, confronting or cajoling the audience (take a banana), sometimes ventriloquizing other characters, sometimes standing to the side, looking at an empty stage as if trying to fill a void.
Dyer and Williams considered merging their monologues into a single play. But this shard-like treatment is true to their vision of a country looking at itself across the divide.
There is no doubt about the need for The Grapes of Wrath. John Steinbeck’s novel casts an unsparing light on the brutal plight of Oklahoma sharecroppers who left their drought-ravaged, dust-storm-torn lands in the 1930s for promised work in California. His account of the forces—environmental and economic—that caused the horror resonates today: exploitation of the land; exploitation of the labor force; cruelty to the newcomers—unforgettably seen in Dorothea Lange’s portraits of the Dust Bowl—classified as migrants rather than people.
Still, it’s hard to feel the need for this stage version. Carrie Cracknell’s production of Frank Galati’s adaptation has a patient, understated performance by Cherry Jones as the Joad family matriarch. It’s partly driven by the dominant, cool voice of Maimuna Memon – she of Standing on the edge of heaven – which sings its own plaintive country songs. It deals with Steinbeck’s jargon and most catastrophes: stillbirth and flood and poverty and beatings and senseless evictions and petty condemnation. It ends with some hope of political awakening and the human symbol of a grieving mother nursing a starving husband. The current echoes resonate as the Joads settle into their tent city.
But apart from an opening swirl of dust-cloud darkness, this hardly evokes the novel’s terrain or suggests the vast distances, emotional and physical, being covered. The evening seems more like staggering along a pavement than wrestling across vast expanses of land. Alex Eales’s design shows a well-rusted lorry – crammed with the family of three generations, an ex-priest, a bucket and a tarpaulin – gently turning to suggest the journey. Before a catastrophic fight, characters move in slow motion with their mouths open. Like a dramatic exercise decorated with mournful utterances.
The theatre company 1927 shuffles categories with beautiful ingenuity. Their shows mix bright human acting, with a Pierrot edge, and cartoonish graphics. Neither form is ever just background; each slides into the other in a wild celebration of variation (‘diversity’, if you will) and make-believe.
Please return as soon as possible (the child heroes are not so good at spelling, but they are good at imagination) is a co-production with the Wiener Burgtheater, directed and written by Suzanne Andrade with film, animation and design by Paul Barritt. A small, white, round boy is an animated drawing; his sister is a flesh-and-blood black teenager. When someone blows smoke from his mouth, the vapor turns into an illuminated graphic question mark. When soup is made, a gang of cartoon onions breaks out into a dance.
This “dysfunctional family show” centers on a father who’s in prison despite his kids coming up with exotic explanations for his absence; a girl who’s bullied at school (mostly by having fried food thrown at her); a grim official visitor who believes “even pudding has to have a purpose”; and a sinister cartoon lion who’s separated from his cubs.
The graphics and flights of fancy (in a Ministry of Joy, women tremble out of windows) are first-rate. Large chunks of the well-intentioned script are redundant, its humane points anchored in the visual work of abandoning your prejudices, a century ahead of the company’s name.
Star Ratings (out of five)
Death of England: Michael ★★★★
Death of England: Delroy ★★★★
The Grapes of Wrath ★★
Please return as soon as possible ★★★
• Death of England: The Plays can be seen at @sohoplace, London until September 28
• The Grapes of Wrath is on view at the Lyttelton, National Theatre, London until September 14
• Please return as soon as possible can be seen at the Studio, Edinburgh until 11 August