Well-meant, ill-advised: Saint George and the Dragon at the National Theatre
Saint George and the Dragon
Olivier Theatre, National Theatre
Circle A73, £15
23 November 2017
NT page
At the interval I was worried that what made me anxious in Rory Mullarkey’s new play Saint George and the Dragon was political, but by the end I’d decided it was only dramaturgical. The play flipped from ill-judged to well-meant, in many ways flattered by comparison with the disgustingly smug Young Marx but nevertheless in need of more external support at the writing stage than it seems to have received.
Which is to make the case sound worse than it is. There is much in Saint George that demonstrates Mullarkey’s talent as a playwright. He can make jokes work, for example. The over-arching format of the play is an intriguing and imaginative one (if not, to my mind, ultimately successful or satisfying). Characterization isn’t really the aim of the game in Saint George’s setup, but the glimpses of it there are firm and credible, and give friendly room to the cast to apply their own stamp (not always not annoyingly, but that’s hardly Mullarkey’s fault).
But the problems are identifiable. The three acts of the play see Saint George attempting to defeat the dragon in three different ages of England (not Britain): vaguely medieval, definitely Victorian and finally modern-day. The idea is to trace the development of an English patriotism, from exceptionalist beginnings through to a Brexited present where with no dragon to fight the saint turns on his own people. It’s a nice idea but it simply doesn’t fit the three-act structure, in which Mullarkey forces himself to demonstrate how the Victorians killed their version of the dragon – capitalism – to leave the way for the dragon’s insidious return in the final act.
His way out of this corner is to have the dragon of capitalism vanquished when George tears up what looks like a piece of paper meant to represent the law. Firstly I’m not sure I agree that’s how you would destroy capitalism. Secondly we can hardly pretend that the capitalism dragon is not alive and very much kicking today, even if there are fewer English children dying in workhouses. In the third act Mullarkey then has to identify what are the problems of today to match the now-gone problem of capitalism, and the results are not convincing: there’s a crowd-pleasing diatribe about over-paid footballers; and otherwise a pub brawl, people speaking behind other people’s backs and in general failing to communicate with the people around them. Aside from the football, are any of these malaise’s exclusive to present-day England? Which makes the only act that works well the first act, with its genuine dragon and uncomplicated celebration of English values. Which is perhaps what Mullarkey was going for, but it’s something of a Pyrrhic victory
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