Racists will love it: National Theatre’s Death of England – Delroy reviewed

Death of England: Delroy is a companion piece to Death of England, which ran in February at the NT and examined the white working classes. Here the focus is on a successful black Briton, Delroy, who votes Tory and feels at home in multicultural society. The charismatic Michael Balogun plays him as a complex, shrewd and humane figure. He likes to mock white people who judge others according to superficialities like accent and pronunciation. And he recalls his horrified excitement when a white girl at school calmly placed her finger inside his boxer shorts. Delroy has plenty of white pals including his girlfriend, Carly, who is expecting their child. The only antisocial voice in his life belongs to his mother, a Jamaican bigot, who objects to Carly’s ethnicity. ‘She can’t cook jerk chicken,’ she crows. But Delroy finds her insult amusing. ‘She slammed that down like a winning domino and kissed her teeth so loudly I thought the glass she was holding would break.’

Things go disastrously wrong when Delroy makes a bad decision on the Tube. Mistaken for a fare dodger, he fails to explain to the police that he’s a law-abiding taxpayer. Instead he curses and screams at them. This arouses their suspicions. ‘Swear at me one more time and you’re coming with us,’ says a senior officer. At this point, Delroy’s fate is in his hands. But he carries on swearing and is duly arrested. In court he doubles his problems by hurling abuse at the judge, and he ends up with an ankle tag and a criminal record. From here, he turns into a Britain-bashing anarchist.

Delroy’s transformation from self-respecting Tory voter to paranoid Marxist loon is hardly credible but it gives the writers, Clint Dyer and Roy Williams, plenty of opportunities for lame political invective and naughty swear words.