The world has changed since Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’ sweary, swaggery, dysfunctional near-family first railed about their lives, shaped by Brexit Britain, in fast, fulminating dramatic monologue. As a trilogy of plays, it began with Michael, the son of a racist flower-seller, originally played by Rafe Spall, who told his lairy story at his father’s funeral. Then, a monologue by his Black British best friend, Delroy, about police profiling and his mixed-race relationship with Michael’s sister, Carly.
These revivals are updated to reflect our world, post-Covid and post-Boris so we recognise the antagonised politics of class, masculine identity and race hate currently coursing through our society, from far-right violence (Southport is not named but it may as well be) to Nigel Farage.
They are staged in a shiny new West End venue and it is surprising that this backdrop does not dampen their riotous spirits, although there is not as much danger in Death of England: Michael starring Thomas Coombes, and now set in 2021.
It is still a feat of monologue theatre, with an energetic central performance, but Coombes’s Michael is a lovable cockney. The effect is more broadly comic with some grotesque humour, but the tortured undertow of filial inadequacy, split loyalties between his father and his friend, Delroy, and jittery mournfulness, are not felt sharply.
His father’s funeral is not quite the emotional car-crash of the original, nor the same visually arresting set-piece, the coffin rising up from the stage floor, then swallowed up again.
Directed by Clint Dyer at 100 minutes straight, we feel its bagginess, the forced redemption of the far-fetched final reveal, and its awkward turns into sentimentality.
The set, designed by ULTZ and Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey, is still strikingly configured as a St George’s cross and the audience sits within its arms, implicated and addressed. The sudden garish bright or blanket dark of Jackie Shemesh’s lighting, along with Benjamin Grant and Pete Malkin’s psychological sound design (words echo after being uttered) give the impression of being inside Michael’s mind, though sometimes the sound and lighting seem overdone.
Death of England: Delroy, starring Paapa Essiedu and now set in the present day, feels more loaded with the everyday police racism and humiliation faced by this working-class bailiff who makes no apologies for having voted for Brexit.
The performance here elevates this play into its own, one-man coup de theatre. Essiedu has astonishing poise, bringing tragic depth and integrity to Delroy but lilting joy and comedy, too. His enraged injustice, when it comes, is immense and you feel it burn. The sentimentality, when that comes, is transformed into a tenderness which brings tears to your eyes.
Like Coombes, he interacts with the audience, teasing and ad-libbing, but with the potential to turn from light to dark in a flash. He is bantering one minute, and tearing up the stage floor the next.
In its story it shows the inherited legacy of racism and how this can intersect with mixed-race friendship and romance. Where Michael is engaged in a reckoning with his absent father, Delroy battles in his mind with his mother, Denise. Both she and Carly are absent presences but Essiedu evokes them so vividly that they seem to enter the drama, although a picaresque depiction of the women still seems a little reductive.
His romance with Carly feels real and hot, despite the discomforting racial politics, and there is a gorgeous moment with a disco ball that conveys heady teen lust.
Also performed over 100 minutes , its plot is also unwieldy but Essiedu’s is a must-see performance that makes magic of even the wobbliest lines.
• At @sohoplace, London, until 28 September
