Quote Of The Day

"Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake - Chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower (1887-1956)"

Thursday, October 29, 2020

Death of England: Delroy... @NationalTheatre Angry, funny, moving, meta - @Mikejbal has power and passion to spare. A great play for today.

Last Saturday night Stuart and I ventured back to the National Theatre on London's glitzy South Bank - for the first time in goodness knows how long - to see punkish state-of-the-nation address Death of England: Delroy.

Death of England: Delroy is a new one-person play by Clint Dyer and Roy Williams written as a response to their own acclaimed monologue Death of England (that starred Rafe Spall) we saw earlier in the year.

Death of England: Delroy is equally fearless - exploding identity, race and class in Britain. Set in London, 2020. His white-British partner needs him. Urgently. But Delroy gets arrested on his way to the hospital.

Filled with anger and grief, he recalls the moments and relationships that gave him hope before his life was irrevocably changed.

Michael Balogun plays Delroy with power and passion as he explores how a Black working class man searches for truth and confronts his relationship with Great Britain.

The whole piece is utterly gripping. But it brought me to tears when Delroy recalled his white-British best friend's words (first uttered in the previous play):

"You might act like us, you might sound like us, but you will never be one of us, and deep down you know it."

Angry, cruel, funny, moving, meta - it is a solo tour-de-force. Truly a play for today.

Running Time: 90 minutes (no interval). If you can, go see.




1 comment:

  1. You are right this is so difficult everyone can't understand this.

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