I’m afraid I’ll sound like I’m ready to let go of you. And I’m not.

Eloquent, playful, big-thinking, tender and fierce – Michael Gow’s new play is an astonishing act of theatrical invention.

Will Drummond is bewildered. All the old certainties are coming apart. When he finds himself sitting by his mother’s bedside in a hospital room on the north coast of New South Wales, suddenly he’s faced with the mortality of loved ones, faced with the state of the world as it was and as it is right now. Set adrift, Will considers loss and what’s left, class and contradiction, and navigating a corporatised and globalised world alone.

Once in Royal David’s City is big and small at once, tumbling from the fifties to the present, from East Berlin to Byron Bay, from brief encounters to the cycles of history. It’s about death and Christmas and class warfare and what to teach school children about politics and art. It’s about the old working class and the new middle class and what one has to learn from each other.

It is beautiful.