@sohoplace | ★★★✩✩
This is the final work in this trilogy of state-of-the-nation plays first seen at the National Theatre. In the beginning there was Michael who was grieving for his racist dad. Then came the perspective from Delroy, Michael’s childhood friend, who is black.
Each of those monologues convey a searing view of working-class life in modern Britain massively informed by skin colour. And now it is the turn of Michael’s sister Carly (Erin Doherty) and Delroy’s Mum Denise (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) who is also Carly’s mother-in-law.
They have gone into business together. Carly the florist has half the premises and Denise runs a Jamaican cafe in the the other half. So estranged are they at the beginning of the play, written by Clint Dyer and Roy Williams, the first impression you get is that they are no more than acquaintances across a racial divide.
Sharon Duncan-Brewster Credit: Helen Murray www.helenmurrayphotos.com @helenmurraypix
It emerges however that they are inextricably linked, with Carly hitched to the love of her life, Denise’s son. What has stressed that bond is a video that has gone viral of Carly at a hen party with her white friends during which she performs a long racist joke about how to be, and be in bed, with a black man. Both women have legacies to shed. Carly has to peel off the racism of her father while Denise somehow has to lighten the weight of “oppression” she feels from living in a country with a colonialist past and a still-racist present.
Seeing the play in the wake of Britain’s far-right riots adds an urgency to the evening. Carly would know many of the people marching to set fire to hotels populated by asylum seekers, even though she has the grace and intelligence to despise them.
The performances in Dyer’s production are excellent. Each actor segues into the voices and accents of the people in their lives with great skill. But Doherty, one of the finest actors of her generation, is downright brilliant as her monologues switch with speed and uncanny accuracy from such extremes as the bulldog truculence of her dad and the Jamaican patois of her mother-in-law.
The writing is no better than solid, however. The potency of the first Death of England partly came from the thrill of seeing a white male and his prejudices and vulnerabilities so completely and humanely understood by black writers: the implied message being, if we can understand you is it so much to ask for you to understand us?
That element is diluted here and occasionally replaced with on-the-nose declarations of societal injustice. Still, the sense of modern Britain being rarely and fairly represented is palpable and undeniably a very good thing.
