Royal Conservatoire of Scotland

'You know what I believe in John? The grey area. The bit between. To any difficult problem, there is never a right solution, there is only ever the best solution. Nothing on Earth is completely pure. I prefer complexity, difficulty, balance. Good and evil? No. Children's words.' Ruth, 13.

A group of Londoners are afflicted by a terrible dream. The city is poised between hope and despair, between conformity and a new idealistic politics inspired by John, a quasi-religious grassroots leader. The prime minister, Ruth, must decide whether to take the country to war, haunted by death in her own family. Economic gloom, ineffective protest and a sense of gathering doom infect the lives of a vivid set of characters linked in an Altmanesque series of colliding and intersecting narratives.