Understudy Michael Balogun takes over Death of England role at National Theatre as Giles Terera withdraws after surgery

Understudy Michael Balogun will take centre stage in the National Theatre's first play since March after Giles Terera was forced to withdraw following emergency surgery.

Balogun will take over the lead in new play Death of England: Delroy, which is due to open on October 21. He has previously performed in Macbeth at the National as well as the UK tours of Inua Ellams’ Barber Shop Chronicles and Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places & Things, has been understudying the role of Delroy throughout rehearsals.

The theatre says that Terera is “recovering well” and that the issue was not Covid related, “however having been informed that he will require a recuperation period of six weeks, very unfortunately, this means he will be unable to perform as previously announced in this run of the production.

“We all send him our best wishes for a speedy recovery.”

Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’ follow-up to critically acclaimed Death of England will see Balogun play a man who is arrested on his way to the hospital and begins to confront his relationship with Britain, "on an illuminating journey into the Black British psyche".

Delroy featured as the best friend of Rafe Spall’s protagonist in Death of England, which opened in February this year and saw a white man in a state of rage following the death of his father.

Speaking about the play, Dyer and Williams said: “There’s a moment in Death of England at his father’s funeral where Michael tells Delroy, ‘you may act like us and talk like us, but you will never be one of us’. In telling Delroy’s story, we hope to take audiences on an illuminating journey into the Black British psyche and realities of a ‘tolerant’ England in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Death of England: Delroy will be performed to socially distanced audiences in the Olivier Theatre, which is being reconfigured as an in-the-round performance space.