Death of England: Delroy

There’s a palpable feeling of hope in the balmy British air at the moment: we’ve just voted in the first Labour government of 14 years, England made it into the Euros final and summer has finally arrived. Dyer and William’s furious revival of Death of England, a dramatic exploration of race, class and identity, is a stark reminder of how far we have to come. I watched Paapa Essideu’s ‘Delroy’.

We meet Delroy in a series of vignettes on the day of his court hearing. It’s energetic and frantic from the very start as Essideu sprints to every arm of LTZ and Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey’s St.George cross stage for each. The following 100 minute monologue documents how the black bailiff got there through impassioned anecdotes and vivid absent presences.

His story is filled to the brim with hefty but important themes. Delroy is committed to a UK life that continues to let him down. It’s riddled with tension: between his black mother and his white girlfriend, his support for Boris’s Brexit but disdain for Farage and his work for a system that is rife with institutional racism that impacts him everyday. It paints a nuanced, if overpacked, portrait of the Black British working class experience.

This edition is the second of the trilogy and follows Michael's performance. Whilst each monologue stands alone, there’s no doubt they would be better in completion, each amplifying a different side of the same story. Sometimes I felt I was missing important pieces of a complicated puzzle: during the reflection on mr. Coombs funeral, the racist father of his white girlfriend and bestfriend Michael, for example.

The plays were staged in 2020, in the more immediate wake of Brexit, but updated for the present. We hear timely reflections on the far right and even hear a cameo of Kendrick’s chart topping dis track. If anything this installment is even more poignant with the emergence of reform and after the broken promises of leaving the EU.

It’s Paapa’s performance though that’s the real highlight. His pace doesn’t drop throughout the full hour and forty minutes and his Delroy is as nuanced as Dyer and Williams' writing. One minute he’s furious, hilarious the next and at times truly heartbreaking. The juxtaposition makes each emotion hit harder and harder.

Whilst it’s a bit too long and as fragmented as the Britain it conveys, Paapa spins this edition of The Death of England into a must see.

It’s on at the Sohoplace London until the 28th of September.