Danelaw at the Old Red Lion

Peter Hamilton (The Poetry of Exile, Bridlington) will return to the Old Red Lion Theatre this Autumn with a new adaptation of his groundbreaking play Danelaw, combining his trademark absurdist writing style with a fierce political and social breakdown of the far/alt-right.

Originally staged in 2005 at the White Bear Theatre, this updated version has adapted to the times, when the idea of a splintering white-supremacist state in East Anglia seems closer to possibility than ever before.

Danelaw plays at the Old Red Lion from 17 September to 5 October 2019 and is loosely inspired by the true story of an attempt by the neo-Nazi group Combat 18 to establish a white- supremacist homeland in East Anglia in the 1990s, with Chelmsford as the capital.

This ambitious project failed to materialise, however, when the leaders of the group were involved in a gruesome murder committed on waste ground in Harlow over an internal party dispute.

Peter Hamilton is once again joined by director Ken McClymont, former artistic director of the Old Red Lion, whose recent credits include A Small House at the Edge of the World (Museum of Comedy, 2018) and Bottalack O'Clock (Old Red Lion, 2016).

Mr Hamilton is the Leeds-born writer - known for Basildon (White Bear Theatre, 2009) and Bridlington (Rosemary Branch Theatre, 2015) - whose writing spans decades and has previously explored themes of disillusion and mental illness in Switchboard (1997) and The Reappearance of Christ in the East End (2005).

Previous credits also include The Poetry of Exile (2017), Playground (2015) and Skara Brae (2007).

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