About Danelaw
Cliff, a racist football thug, is serving five years in prison for assaulting an Asian man at a Millwall game when he is visited by the mysterious Mr. Warboys, who offers him the chance to re-establish the DANELAW - the Golden Age of Viking rule. And so begins a darkly-comic tragedy of violence and death… DANELAW is based on the true story of an attempt by the neo-Nazi group COMBAT 18 to establish a white supremacist homeland in East Anglia in the 1980s, with Chelmsford as the capital. This failed, however, when the party’s accountant absconded with all the party funds and was subsequently pursued and stabbed to death by “Charlie” Sergeant, the leader of COMBAT 18, in a caravan park in Harlow. These events were reported in the anti-Fascist magazine SEARCHLIGHT which also contained, around the same time, reports of the Security Services mounting so-called “honey-trap” operations, whereby they advertised for recruits to new but completely bogus far-Right groups, so that they could keep an eye on anybody who applied as Persons Of Interest. The play takes this device a logical stage further where the Secret Service advertises a whites-only homeland based on the ancient Viking Danelaw of the 9th and 10th centuries, with the promise to train up any applicants into a private army at a secret military base in Norfolk. When their training is complete they will start attacking mosques and so on, with the intention of starting an all-out race war, and subsequently establishing the ancient Danelaw again, stretching from the River Lea in Bow, East London, up to the River Humber. The plan is then to arrest them all at the last minute and incarcerate them in Belmarsh for thirty years. But it doesn’t quite work out according to plan … Age Recommendation: 16+