She liked difference and edginess: hence her taking on Caryl Churchill, Edward Bond and Joe Orton. She famously fell out with Prick Up Your Ears playwright John Lahr about Orton. In the opening scene she has been up all night to go to a police station, where she obtained bail for one of her authors.
The score is alternative rock by Duncan Sheik with the book and lyrics by Steven Sater. There is a beautiful clarity to the sung words. It is pretty raunchy stuff with scenes of sado-masochism and masturbation but it has an honesty lacking in society then, and to a lesser extent, now.
Set in the genteel town, next to Brighton, of Hove, we meet jaded GP Dr Arthur Wicksteed (the delightful Jasper Britton) aged 53. His wife Muriel (Catherine Russell) longs for the romance she had, before marrying Wicksteed. The beau (and I use the word loosely here) she rejected is Sir Percy Shorter (Dan Starkey), the five feet nothing president of the BMA.