Progress

Anxious to match his wife's liberal concerns, Will has taken over most of the household chores, and has formed a male consciousness-raising group, whose principal interest seems to be a close examination of pornography

Ronee, however, is now involved with a female lover, and her unwillingness to expand the relationship to a menage a trois (as Will would like) has driven a wedge between husband and wife

Further complications arise when Ronee brings home a young battered wife, Ange, whose brutish young husband soon discovers her whereabouts and tries, by force, to take her home

Also in and out of the action are the rather pathetic Oliver, who is shattered by the sudden absence of his live-in lover, Martin; a young barman named Bruce (who is Martin's new boyfriend); and Will and Ronee's boarder, Mark, a Fleet Street gutter journalist who delights in tasteless jokes and imagines himself to be sexually irresistible

Filled with bitterly funny repartee, and sudden bouts of anger and violence, it is the uneasy relationship between these characters which forms the disturbing, but revealing, heart of the play - and, when all pretenses are stripped away, demonstrates how little these middle-class activists are able to bring order to their own lives, much less to the larger society in which they are foundering

A lacerating, bitter but wildly funny black comedy, which offers a scathing appraisal of the social ills besetting contemporary Britain

"Not unlike Joe Orton, Mr Lucie propels his play's action with the devices of boulevard comedy-all the better to upend pious bourgeois characters on their own turf" ~ NY Times

" a brilliantly brutal and funny account of life among the caring classes in London " ~ London Observer

" some of the most viciously funny, ruefully accurate dialogue I have heard in a long time" ~ London Standard

" Mr Lucie has a savage eye, a keen ear, and acerbic pen" ~ The Spectator