Family, Community, Country, and Race: The State of the Nation Plays of Roy Williams and Clint Dyer

This article examines the complexity of dramatizing race relations in terms of class, gender, and ethnicity from a Black British perspective in four State of the Nation plays by Roy Williams and Clint Dyer. In 2002, Black dramatist Roy Williams wrote Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads, set in a south-west London working-class pub where Williams explores a microcosm of complex attitudes and perspectives about nation and race among a mixture of races, genders, and ages. Eighteen years later, Roy Williams and the Black dramatist and director Clint Dyer wrote a trilogy of stage plays with the overall title Death of England, comprising two monodramas, Death of England (2020) and Death of England: Delroy (2020), plus a duologue, Death of England: Closing Time (2023). The trilogy is underpinned by the metaphoric use of the family drama as an illustration of the state of race and class in England. The social and cultural context for the metaphor is conveyed by the creation of a new mixed-race family living in Leyton, a traditionally working-class community in east London. Although the plays are thematically discrete, together they offer a complex and comprehensive picture of race and class in England. In this article, I argue that despite their similar approaches to the State of the Nation genre, at the close of the Death of England plays, unlike in Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads, there is some hope articulated in the struggle for a racially egalitarian future.