![]() ![]() Via Zoom, FaceTime, email, text and many phone calls, Clint and I got busy. 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. 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. I remember thinking at the time, I hope this challenges people’s perception of what a Black play is.Īfter Brexit, Covid. 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 think we messed with some heads with our one-man show. 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. 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. 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. 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.Įveryone I knew was depressed as the 31 January 2020 deadline for the UK to leave the EU edged closer. ![]() I was more inspired by the likes of Richard Pryor, Micky Flanagan, even Mike Reid. I wasn’t thinking of an Alan Bennett character-study type of monologue. 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. It was too big and I felt the original world and point of view of Michael Fletcher was getting lost. The first draft was almost four hours long, a beast. The hostility felt by those losing towards those they felt they were losing to didn’t need spelling out.įearless … Michael Balogun in Death of England: Delroy at the National Theatre, London, in 2020. 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 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.Īll of the characters we had by then were dealing with loss, and the pain of loss. We could have written a dozen plays with the material we ended up with. A bunch of brilliant actors were assembled, and we embarked on a Mike Leigh type of exercise to find characters and backstories through improvisation. 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. 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. 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. Death of England: Rafe Spall stars in a microplay by the Guardian and the Royal Court Guardian ![]()
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