With the embers of the Ballymena riots still burning after a week of racial chaos in Northern Ireland, you could say this play has captured the zeitgeist of the UK at a most perilous time.
Rebekah Harrison’s What Does It Take to Slay a Dragon? is a visceral, thoughtful interrogation of radicalisation and national identity in contemporary Britain.
It’s not a play for the faint-hearted, but it is one for the reflective-minded.
What Does it take to Slay a Dragon at 53two
As Harrison herself explains, this is a story she began writing in 2019, amid the political turbulence of Brexit and the resurgence of nationalist rhetoric. She says bluntly: “People weren’t talking about it, or they didn’t have the language to talk about it. In theatre, we do not have the language to talk about [the rise of the right].”
By embedding her interrogation of extremism in the lived experience of an ordinary delivery driver, she gives us the language we’ve been missing.
Set in a drab, unnamed UK city filled with bureaucratic grey zones, an attempt at a green space (we’re looking at you, Piccadilly Gardens) and anti-homeless infrastructure, the play centres on Billy, a delivery driver whose life spirals into chaos after he’s asked to remove a St. George’s flag from his dashboard.
What unfolds from this seemingly minor dispute is a devastating chain of events that leads to his alienation, radicalisation, and, ultimately, tragic violence.
Simon Naylor as Billy
Simon Naylor delivers a pitch-perfect performance as Billy. His portrayal captures both the vulnerability and volatility of a man battered by circumstance and drawn into the orbit of dangerous ideologues.
His relationship with Ali (Shaban Dar), a childhood friend and colleague, played with nuance and emotional weight, begins as a tense HR confrontation and evolves into a metaphor for the state of modern Britain, fractured and increasingly unwilling to listen to the lessons of the past.
Narratively, the play is part confession, part cautionary tale. The stage design, a dismembered white van bonnet used as a projection surface, serves as a metaphor for the broken vehicle of national identity, literally and figuratively. Locations are generic, only illuminated by projected words on the bonnet. I feel the point of this is to homogenise the location, it could really be anywhere in the UK.
Surrounding actors sit in the shadows, stepping in and out of vignettes like silent witnesses or ghosts. The entire ensemble remains physically close to the action, heightening the play’s claustrophobic urgency.
Harrison herself interjects as narrator, offering sharp, satirical reflections on the world outside the play, drawing on TikTok discourse, tabloid tropes, and even the infamous lemming suicide myth fabricated by Disney, to explore how easily manipulated collective narratives can become.
These meta-moments are not only clever; they’re essential. They remind us that what we’re watching is theatre, but also that it is painfully, and at times, frighteningly real.
George Miller’s as Stevie Smith
George Miller’s portrayal of Stevie Smith, a chilling, Tommy Robinson-esque figure, is one of the standout performances. Lurking in the background until the moment he senses weakness, Stevie embodies the opportunistic demagogue. He doesn’t scream; he waits, listens, and pounces, whispering just what the vulnerable need to hear.
The play’s exploration of Britishness is layered and powerful. Through repeated renditions of patriotic songs, “Land of Hope and Glory,” “I Vow to Thee My Country,” “Rule Britannia”, sung by different characters at different emotional moments, the production reclaims, reinterprets, and sometimes taints these anthems.
When an immigrant character, who has previously been racially abused, sings “I Vow to Thee My Country” in tears at the Jobcentre, the familiar words hit with unbearable irony.
There are also moments of disarming humour, absurdity highlighting absurd truths.
In one interlude, a bigoted outburst on a Welsh bus ends with the cutting line: “We are in Wales, and we are speaking Welsh.”
Another monologue compares the left and right’s perceived ridiculousness: Nigel Farage being summoned to action over a pint, versus Jeremy Corbyn bottling jam for Gaza. The point is not who is more ludicrous, but how perception, shaped by experience, media, and need, twists reality into myth.
The play doesn’t offer answers. It offers questions, uncomfortable, necessary ones.
How do working-class men like Billy, alienated and pushed aside, get pulled into online hate? How does grief, economic hardship, and perceived cultural loss morph into toxic nationalism?
As Billy’s life disintegrates, he loses his job, alienates his immigrant wife Eleanor, and is manipulated by Stevie Smith—the play simmers toward violence. The ominous revving of his van, repeated across scenes, becomes a loaded motif: will he, or won’t he, plough into a crowd? When it finally happens (or doesn’t), the ambiguity is deliberate.
Because the world is ambiguous. Because people are messy. Because ideology rarely makes sense, even to its believers.
The final monologue, delivered by Harrison, refuses neat closure. A mass casualty event occurs. The vote, whatever it is, is postponed. Everyone has lied to someone.
Everyone is being lied to. And yet, in all this confusion, there is a sliver of clarity: we must listen to one another, especially to those whose views we fear or hate.
Only then can the lies be unpicked.
The play closes with a haunting quote from Tony Benn:
“There is no final victory as there is no final defeat. There is just the same battle to be fought over and over again.”
And the words from the great man are as prescient then as they are now. We must start to listen and talk to each other.
You can get tickets to see What Does it take to Slay a Dragon at 53two by clicking here
You can get tickets to see What Does it take to Slay a Dragon at 53two by clicking here
