Clockhouse Theatre Company

'There isn't going to be no revolution. I've told you: you can't change the world.'

Playground is about the fragmented or broken society. It's about the lost, the damaged and the disappointed. About rattling about in the nightmarish modern world. It takes the form of a murder mystery. It takes place in a park. Someone's been decapitating children with a fret-saw. Someone's been reading Enid Blyton. Something has gone badly wrong.

Peter Hamilton's gruesomely comic follow-up to his hit play Bridlington reunites him with acclaimed director/designer and Old Red Lion legend, Ken McClymont (Mugs Arrows,No Picnic,Beak Street) in a story of things falling apart beneath the swing-set.

Two detectives struggle to solve a spate of child murders in Victoria Park, East London. Small bodies found beheaded with a Famous Five novel lying open on top of them. Suspects are readily available: previous and current patients at Bow Road Psychiatric Unit; Danny, a night cleaner at Canary Wharf; Stuart, a rough-sleeper from Walthamstow; private school drop-out-turned-Communist Tamsin; or frayed and failed Carolyn who teeters on the brink of another suicide attempt. Then there's Bella, the proprietor of canal-side Drop-In Cafe, who just happens to go about with a ferocious looking knife in her shoulder-bag.