Next Sunday, the National Theatre celebrates its 60th birthday. How fitting that this should be marked by the opening of Death of England, a vital exploration of the state of Britain. How apt that this exploration should have been atomised, split into separate dramas: fragmented like the country it investigates. How enriching that it should accumulate, building an arc across generations. What a distance from the first instalment and this, the fourth.
Written by Clint Dyer and Roy Williams, the saga began in February 2020, with a scorching monologue by a young white man, looking back on a just-dead racist father. It ends, for now, with a black woman in her 50s and a thirtysomething white woman who are unofficially mother- and daughter-in-law. A baby with a black father and a white mother is crucial to the plot: perhaps in time she will have her own play?
