Front Row

Roy Williams joins Samira Ahmed to talk about Death of England: Delroy. Just before Lockdown 2, this play’s opening night became its closing night. The understudy Michael Balogun had just stepped into the role. Luckily the press and audience loved it, and the film of that performance will be available on the National Theatre’s youtube channel this Friday. Directed by Clint Dyer, and written by Roy Williams and Clint Dyer, this powerful monologue explores the experiences of a working class Black British man who has been told by his best friend that he ‘will never be one of us’. Fred D’Aguiar spent his childhood in Guyana, his teens in South London and now lives in California. All this experience is distilled in his novels, plays and, especially, his many books of poetry. We talk to him about his new collection, Letters to America which addresses his adopted country in poems such as ‘Burning Paradise’ and ‘Downtown L.A’, but also Britain and the Caribbean, with work influenced by Philip Larkin, Derek Walcott an