Will Drummond is bewildered. All the old certainties are coming apart. His parents are suddenly old, theatre is not what it used to be, people around him are losing their minds and losing faith, the world is shrinking, and what does it even mean to live in a society any more? Once in Royal David's City is big and small at once, tumbling from the fifties to the present, from West Berlin to Byron Bay, from brief encounters to the cycles of history. It is about mothers and sons, lost innocence, omnipresent death. It is about rage. It is about the brilliant possibilities of theatre.