Summer 2014, Brazil. The Fifa World Cup tournament. With their long-ball playing, the England men’s team had proved that football was most definitely not coming home. Again. But that wasn’t the only thing to dampen spirits. It was about this time that the word Brexit, coined two years earlier, seemed to take hold.
It was also around then I was approached to write a short film, commissioned by the Royal Court in collaboration with the Guardian, as one of six writers invited to create “microplays” to be filmed, each inspired by a section of the paper’s coverage. Sport was an obvious choice for me and my assigned director, my friend and fellow football fan Clint Dyer (an actor, writer and director but not by then risen to his current rank as deputy artistic director of the National Theatre). When we first talked, he suggested a funeral setting would capture the mood of the time. The way England played that summer, it certainly felt like a funeral.
Viewers first met the character of Michael Fletcher, a trader on his dad’s flower stall – brilliantly portrayed in the microplay by Rafe Spall – in a drug-fuelled, alcohol-sodden state, letting rip at the congregation for his father’s funeral. That film focuses on one man’s anger not just at losing his football-loving and bigoted dad but also his undirected fury as a white working-class man who doesn’t feel good enough about himself and blames others for his own inabilities. Much like his country. It truly was the Death of England.
We had a blast making the film and Clint soon convinced me there was more to say about the world of Michael Fletcher, his family and friends, and that we could “open out” the story. Motivated as much by the fun of working together as by what we wanted to say, we carried on laughing and riffed regularly – now as co-writers – on what we thought we could and could not get away with in terms of telling the story about Michael and his confused racism.
It wasn’t until 2017, when the National Theatre gave us three weeks in the New Work department to work and play, that our ideas really began to come together. A bunch of brilliant actors were assembled, and we embarked on a Mike Leigh type of exercise to find characters and backstories through improvisation. We could have written a dozen plays with the material we ended up with. The National liked where we’d got to and firmly committed to a play for the Dorfman stage, which, we all agreed, had to be titled Death of England like the original film.
All of the characters we had by then were dealing with loss, and the pain of loss. We kept the funeral idea and the death of Michael’s dad, and the metaphor of England’s decline as football champions, but there was also loss of opportunity for a white working class which felt left behind, loss of identity of a Britain that was no longer at the head of a world-dominating empire, a perceived loss of traditions and a way of life as white Britain had irrevocably changed into a Britain of many colours and cultures. The hostility felt by those losing towards those they felt they were losing to didn’t need spelling out.
The first draft was almost four hours long, a beast. It was too big and I felt the original world and point of view of Michael Fletcher was getting lost. I thought we could try to keep as much of the surrounding characters and stories as possible but to rewrite it as a one-person play. I wasn’t thinking of an Alan Bennett character-study type of monologue. I was more inspired by the likes of Richard Pryor, Micky Flanagan, even Mike Reid. It was their standup comedy energy, their way of engaging with the audience from the stage with their storytelling through multiple characters that I had in mind.
Everyone I knew was depressed as the 31 January 2020 deadline for the UK to leave the EU edged closer. By coincidence or good timing, that was also the date of our first preview at the Dorfman, with the illuminated words “Death of England” on constant loop across the top of the National’s building.
We were lucky enough to have Rafe Spall back in what we restored as the only role and he was electric, questioning as Michael what he had left to believe in. One minute, sobbing into his beer in defeat, next spitting fury in defiance or turning on the charm tap to banter with individuals he’d picked out in the audience.
I think we messed with some heads with our one-man show. What? Written by two Black writers? For one white character? Is it a Black play or not? I always thought of it as a play about Britishness by two Black British writers. I remember thinking at the time, I hope this challenges people’s perception of what a Black play is.
After Brexit, Covid. The threat of a theatre shutdown hung over Death of England but it got to the end of its run only a few days before the first UK lockdown finally hit. By then, Clint and I had pitched our idea of a follow-up one- person piece, told through the eyes of Michael’s best friend Delroy Tomlin, who is Black.
Via Zoom, FaceTime, email, text and many phone calls, Clint and I got busy. We shared so many stories of growing up Black and British in this country. Clint was born and raised in the East End of London; the streets of west London’s Notting Hill were my manor. I was stopped and searched more than a handful of times by the police between the ages of 14 and 21. I never mouthed off, they didn’t rough me up, but it was unsettling every time.
Clint had the worst story. He was on his way to an audition when, on the escalator at a Tube station, he was jumped and then arrested by undercover cops. Of course, it was a case of mistaken identity and they offered him a half-arsed apology before releasing him from custody. To make matters worse, Clint’s then-agent thought he was joking and the casting director of the TV drama he should have been auditioning for believed Clint had made the story up because he forgot about the appointment that day. Yes, young Black men couldn’t possibly be stopped for no good reason by the police, could they?
The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement worldwide during the summer of 2020 made sure our pencils remained sharpened and our minds focused. I received messages from several well-meaning white colleagues, expressing their sorrow and anger at the murder of George Floyd. Clint and I had a laugh when we both received exactly the same text message from a mutual associate. We wondered if this person had sent the same message to every Black friend in their phone book. After a hard writing day, we egged each other on in a bit of mischief. We synchronised our watches and pinged back our same message in return, thanking the sender and asking, where had they got their message from, was it Hallmark? The grovelling apology arrived faster than a Google search page. Said associate was lucky to be dealing with us. I could name a number of Black practitioners who would have called the offender out over social media for such insensitivity and cheapness. It is not what was said in the message that riled, but how it made us feel. We were not treated as individuals; it was as if our response to George Floyd/Black Lives Matter had to be the same.
Questions of whether or not Black people in the 21st century were accepted on the same terms as white people, and of belonging, were very much in our minds as we worked on the second play, Death of England: Delroy. The jumping-off point from the previous play for us was Michael’s line to Delroy (his friend, don’t forget): “You may sound like us, but you will never be one of us.” I have heard that comment made in many different ways in my life. You can’t overestimate its impact.
Later that year, after months of lockdown, restrictions began to ease. We were well and truly shook when the National’s director Rufus Norris told us he wanted to reopen the theatre with our play in the largest space, the Olivier.
The entire building on the first day of rehearsals was deserted. The Death of England: Delroy company were the only ones allowed inside. Each of us was issued with a buzzer to wear around the neck like a lanyard – it would go off whenever anyone got closer than two metres to anyone else. Fun at first, but it soon got old.
We felt like pioneers battling the odds but none of us was prepared for the two crises that followed. First, our Delroy, our only actor, Giles Terera, who was proving perfect in the role, was forced by a ruptured appendix to drop out after three weeks of rehearsal. With about 10 days to go, his fearless understudy, Michael Balogun, stepped in and created a Delroy that was perfect in a completely different way.
Then along came crisis number two: Covid cases were back on the rise, another lockdown was coming. After a week and a half of previews, our 4 November 2020 press night became our closing night. But there was a silver lining: the brilliant National Theatre Live team came through and filmed the final performance at 48 hours’ notice and we were able to release it online as a special 24-hour release for free on YouTube, where it had 80,000 views worldwide.
Restrictions were lifted. Then new ones were imposed. It all got very confusing. Especially for theatreland, which had no clear idea of when it could fully reopen its doors again. By Christmas, at the end of 2020, the National’s Lyttelton space had been converted into a studio for the filming of productions for broadcast on Sky Arts, to keep the show on the road in such an uncertain time. Romeo and Juliet was up first. Then it was the third in our series, Death of England: Face to Face.
Set in a pandemic/post-Brexit world, it was an opportunity for our two male protagonists (with Giles Terera getting his turn as Delroy and Neil Maskell joining as Michael) to appear together, for Michael to atone for his racist behaviour in the first play, and for Delroy to decide whenever he can truly forgive his best friend for racially abusing him at the funeral. Can a friendship really endure under those circumstances, was the question that drove this (at 90 minutes, feature-length) film. We weren’t necessarily conscious of it, but in retrospect it’s probably fair to say that we were all looking at our various relationships at that time, wondering whether/when they would recover from our enforced isolation. Maybe it was a now-or-never time of truth telling in some ways too? Hard to remember now that the old normal is again the new normal.
Anyhow, in the midst of all that, we made this film. A Bafta nomination for best single drama was our reward.
Now, three years after the first play at the National, comes the next (final?) chapter, back in the Dorfman, Death of England: Closing Time. This time it is the turn of the women, who have been mentioned (but not seen) in the previous pieces and are strong motivators in the lives of the male characters. Played by Hayley Squires, Carly is Michael’s kid sister, and the mother of Delroy’s child, while Denise (Jo Martin) is Delroy’s mum. Carly and her mixed-race baby look forward to an England of the future; both she and Denise need to reconcile the past. These women are two of life’s heavylifters. They keep the world turning. We were not short of inspiration. Unimaginably high energy bills. Failure of small businesses. Over-dependence on food banks in one of the world’s richest countries. A nation mourning its Queen. Cancel culture running rife. Immigrants, go home!
It was never our intention to even attempt so-called state of the nation plays. But writing through such tumultuous times is bound to have informed some of what we’ve come up with. It is a matter of pride that two writers of colour have been entrusted to do it – at our National Theatre, too.
Death of England: Closing Time is at the National Theatre, London, 13 September-11 November
