Strange to be watching the tremendous Death of England monologues last week week. First having begun to glimpse – I think – the country’s rebirth, then, after Southport, seeing its subterranean horrors. Originally seen separately at the National four years ago, the first two parts of Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’s trilogy (the third follows in August) flare on to the stage as dark memories, warnings – and glorious celebrations of acting power.
Less like plays than tumults made flesh, Michael and Delroy would be treasurable as records of the divisions and despair that became glaringly apparent – or more discussed – after Brexit and through the pandemic. Yet they are more than chronicles. These dramatic imaginings of the lives of two young men from Leyton, east London, whose friendship is ringed and threatened by racism – one is black, one white – twist and turn unpredictably: is that racist, flower-selling father quite what he seems? Most important, they are richly expressed: where else would someone hear a pair of eyes rolling behind him?
The intensity is unremitting: both plays would profit from a 15-minute tuck. Yet Dyer’s production is dynamic, helped by the clarity and drive of the design, by Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey and Ultz. Two platforms intersect to form a St George’s Cross – at one point the red floor covering gets ripped up and parcelled among the audience. Crucial objects are arranged around the stage like installations or offerings in a mausoleum: boxing gloves, a cameo of Britannia, funereal white flowers spelling out “DAD”.
Since admiring him as he punched his way through Barbarians nine years ago, I have wanted to see Thomas Coombes again on stage: he has been snaffled by TV (most recently in Baby Reindeer). He is terrific as Michael, the white boy whose father dies while watching England lose at football (the script takes in the most recent defeat), delivering his 100-minute speech like a convulsion. He roars and continually shudders, as if waves of anger and bewilderment were rushing through him into words. Paapa Essiedu, in a more sympathetic role as Delroy, is a wonderful combination of force and insinuation, gliding through degrees of bafflement and outrage, both frank and subtle. Both use the stage like standups, confronting or cajoling the audience (have a banana), sometimes ventriloquising other characters, sometimes standing to the side, looking at an empty stage as if trying to populate a void.
Dyer and Williams thought of bringing their monologues together as a single play. But this shard-like treatment is true to their vision of a country looking at itself over gulfs.
There is no doubting the necessity for The Grapes of Wrath. John Steinbeck’s novel shines an unflinching light on the brutal circumstances of the Oklahoma tenant farmers who in the 1930s left their drought-devastated, dust-stormed land to trek to promised work in California. His account of the forces – environmental and economic – that brought about the horror still resounds: exploitation of land; exploitation of the workforce; cruelty towards the new arrivals – unforgettably seen in Dorothea Lange’s dust bowl portraits – classified as migrants rather than people.
Still, it is hard to feel the need for this theatrical version. Carrie Cracknell’s production of Frank Galati’s adaptation has a patient, restrained performance by Cherry Jones as the Joad family matriarch. It is partly steered by the commanding, cool voice of Maimuna Memon – she of Standing at the Sky’s Edge – who delivers her own keening country songs. It gets in Steinbeck’s lingo and most of the catastrophes: stillbirth and flood and penury and beatings and pointless evictions and small-minded condemnation. It ends with some hope of political awakening and the human symbol of a bereaved mother breastfeeding a starving man. The current echoes ring out as the Joads settle into their tent camp.
Yet, apart from an opening swirl of dust bowl darkness, this scarcely evokes the novel’s terrain or suggests the great distances, emotional and physical, that are travelled. The evening is more like tottering along a pavement than struggling across great wastes of land. Alex Eales’s design features a well-rusted truck – crammed with the three-generational family, an ex-priest, a bucket and a tarpaulin – which revolves gently to suggest the journey. For a cataclysmic fight, characters go into slow motion with their mouths hanging open. Like a drama exercise festooned with sad sayings.
The theatre company 1927 jumble categories with beautiful inventiveness. Their shows mingle bright human acting, with a pierrot edge, and cartoon-like graphics. Neither form is ever merely background; each slips into the other with a wild celebration of variety (“diversity”, if you like) and make-believe.
Please Right Back (the child heroes aren’t much good at spelling but very good at imagining) is a co-production with the Vienna Burgtheater, directed and written by Suzanne Andrade with film, animation and design by Paul Barritt. A small, white, roundfaced boy is an animated drawing; his sister is a flesh-and-blood black teenager. When someone blows smoke from their mouth, the vapour turns into an illuminated graphic question mark. When soup is made, a gang of cartoon onions break into dance.
This “dysfunctional family show” features a father who is in prison, though his children dream up exotic explanations for his absence; a girl who is bullied at school (mostly by having fried food chucked at her); a grim official visitor who thinks “even pudding should be purposeful”; and a lugubrious cartoon lion who is separated from his cubs.
The graphics and flights of fancy (a Ministry of Joy has women trilling out of windows) are first-rate. Large swathes of the well-intentioned script are redundant, its humane points entrenched in the abandon-your-preconceptions visual work, 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 Right Back ★★★
• Death of England: The Plays are at @sohoplace, London, until 28 September
• The Grapes of Wrath is at the Lyttelton, National Theatre, London, until 14 September
• Please Right Back is at the Studio, Edinburgh, until 11 August, and tours the UK until 21 December
