Albion the brave

I APOLOGISE to readers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but I wanted to focus this week on plays about England. This is not for nationalist reasons, but because I’ve recently seen, on successive nights, two works that deal with one part of our disunited kingdom.

One is a revival of Mike Bartlett’s at the Almeida (closing this weekend, but with plans for a TV broadcast). The other is the bluntly titled by Roy Williams and Clint Dyer at the Dorfman. Both are extraordinary plays; both reveal the mix of love and loathing, admiration and anger, that dramatists display when