By Neil Durham

WORTH A LOOK?: ****/*****/****

WHEN?: Saturday 24 August and runs through 28 September 2024 RUNTIME: 3 successive 100-minute plays without interval

Paapa Essiedu (The Effect, National Theatre) plays Delroy in the 2nd of these intertwined state-of-the-nation dramas and it’s a performance so electric it draws an immediate standing ovation from an audience including Pedro Pascal and Russell Tovey (Constellations, Vaudeville Theatre) who are sitting together near our front row seat.

• Read on for reasons including how this is brutally honest and unflinching work unafraid to take a deep dive into the nation’s heart

Death Of England: Michael, Death Of England: Delroy and Death Of England: Closing Time were written by Clint Dyer and Roy Williams and were originally performed at the National Theatre.

Delroy won monstas for our Best New Play in 2020 and Best Theatre Actor for Michael Balogun in 2020.

All 3 pieces are playing together @SohoPlace and on Saturdays there’s an opportunity to see each of them, 1 after the other, with near 2-hour breaks in between.

Thomas Coombes plays Michael who is separated from his wife, works on his father’s flower stall, is an Orient fan and is in crisis after the death of his father as he meditates on his heartbreak about the country that shaped his father and his legacy.

It’s an extraordinary performance on a stage representing a red St George’s cross allowing Coombes to descend from it into the audience, there’s much interaction and at 1 point we’re so close to him we can see how much sweat his very physical performance is requiring.

We’d seen Delroy before too but we weren’t prepared for an explosive performance from Essiedu which is, quite simply, the must-see turn by any actor in the West End currently and perhaps for a very long time.

Once again he’s into the audience and challenging members of it as we learn his story about a wrongful arrest as his girlfriend Carly, Michael’s sister, is going into labour with their 1st child.

For various reasons we never caught the final instalment in this trilogy on its National run and Erin Doherty, who was tremendous as a young Princess Anne in The Crown, couldn’t be further from her as Carly with Sharon Duncan-Brewster as her ‘mother-in-sin’ Denise in Closing Time as the pair launch a business together that is closed as a result of social media reaction to Carly’s ill-advised behaviour.

During the hen-do sequence where Carly is filmed with mock laser gun in hand she attempts to make us flinch by lunging at us and then compliments us as we coolly fail to react.

Closing Time isn’t quite a match for the explosive monologues that precede it but what it does offer is a form of redemption as Carly apologises for her family’s past racist behaviour and despite Denise’s chef dreams being thwarted by it there is recognition that with education people can change.

We weren’t the only people to see these extraordinarily well-written plays about England’s race problem and we noticed some stayed in the same seats for all as we did while others moved about this gorgeous intimate venue for different views.

With race riots on UK streets this summer, it’s a credit to Nimax Theatres that it’s putting on such brutally honest and unflinching work unafraid to take a deep dive into the nation’s heart and expose whatever raw horrors lurk there.

It’s some of the best theatre we suspect we’ll ever see with performances including Essiedu’s which we wonder whether we will ever see be bettered.

• Main pictures via Facebook courtesy Nimax Theatres Tickets
• Have you seen a Death Of England show before and what did you think of this 1? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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