Death of England: Michael- @sohoplace, London

Writers: Clint Dyer and Roy Williams

Director: Clint Dyer

The Death of England is the most significant play cycle of the twenty-first century, and it has finally been given the prominence it deserves with a repertory season and West End transfer at @sohoplace, allowing a whole new audience to meet the Fletchers and the Tomlins – two families whose lives and whole conception of British identities are deeply intertwined. It starts back where it all began with the newly retitled Death of England: Michael, first staged in a pre-pandemic 2020 and slightly updated to relocate the action to late 2021. A deeply insightful reflection on Englishness, working-class masculinity and family, this play has lost none of its traction in the years since it premiered at the National Theatre.

Florist Alan Fletcher has dominated his family all their lives and Michael struggles to live up to his father’s expectations either as a son or an Englishman. So when Alan unexpectedly dies during a crucial football match, Michael begins to crumble, reflecting on the many contradictions about the father he lost and the deeply racist beliefs that infiltrate Michael’s friendship with best friend Delroy.

Michael’s story sets the scene for everything else to come in the Death of England trilogy and although they could be watched in any order, this opening monologue is hugely important as a way into the core debates on Britishness and Englishness, opportunity and state-of-the-nation failure that writers Clint Dyer and Roy Williams see all around us. Originally created as a standalone piece, the core threads here of racial disharmony, identity, family and friendship are established through Michael’s perspective and carried through to the narratives that follow.

Directing his show for @sohoplace, Dyer’s production makes a mark straight away with the drugged and drunk Michael full of attitude, filling the space with nervy energy as he tries to reconcile his father’s death. Absent presence is absolutely key to the success of Death of England as each actor stands alone conjuring up not only individuals like Delroy, his mum Denise and Carly who we go on to meet, but also people like Alan who the audience only ever understand from others.

Considering himself a ‘proper’ Englishman, Michael’s dad is as real as anyone and you know him immediately, the cheery affability, the male middle-aged emphatic certainty about all things from football to immigration and he is a stereotype of a working-class man of a particular generation, until he suddenly isn’t quite or only what his son has claimed. It acts as a reminder that the Death of England is a puzzle of individual perspectives to put together and even then we probably won’t have the full story.

Originally played by Rafe Spall and then by Neil Maskell on film, Thomas Coombes reminds us why Michael is such a great role for an actor, a young man both lost in admiration and hatred for a father that Delroy later tells us Michael cowered in front of. Coombes is incredibly charismatic, charming with the audience and bounding around the stage drawing individuals into the story, making Michael a grown-up lost boy who you feel huge sympathy for struggling with a grief he doesn’t know how to place. The central contradictions are fascinating; has Michael inherited his father’s racism, does the play’s excavation reveal a deeply buried sense of white superiority or is he just sloughing off the man Alan wanted him to be and finding his own way at last? Coombes keeps you guessing.

There are some lovely touches in this new adaptation including a bit of National Theatre cross-posting with Dear England – another contemporary play about conflicting British identity – with scenes set during the Euros 2020 England final that offer future opportunities for a different repertory season. “We are shit at everything,” Michael declares and while Dyer and Williams give Alan a slightly too easy final send-off, the knife-edge emotions of Death of England: Michael set the Fletcher-Tomlin rollercoaster in motion.

Runs until28 September 2024