Guns in Dragonland

★★★ Last year, 5,151 children and teenagers were shot in the USA, killing 1,403 of them. Schools have responded with various measures to improve safety, from shooter drills to communications systems that alert staff and students to hide or escape. All of this increases the anxieties of children and their families.

Guns in Dragonland focuses on this family trauma. It opens with Lilah, a child playing with a lad decked in a dragon costume. Suddenly, she hears noises and screams. Dragon Lad tries to dissuade her from investigating its source, but she heads back to where the sound is coming from, with terrible consequences.

Another scene takes us to a school lockdown drill, which prompts different responses from a gathering of kids. One, smoking a cigarette, doesn’t seem to care, while another is getting bored with the drills. But one young girl is terrified by the event.

A final scene shifts to a Christmas family scene in which a young child is given the gift of a cloth animal. The gesture triggers distress in another family member who recognises it as a toy belonging to Lilah, the child in the opening scene, who was killed in a school shooting many years before.

This thoughtful, well-performed play reminds us of the layers of family suffering at the brutal receiving end of a catastrophic gun culture in America.