Habeas Corpus

We are in Brighton’s plush, silk-stocking district of Hove. Here, in a satirical merry-go-round, we meet the Wicksteed family and their friends and acquaintances for whom the determination to put sex and the satisfactions of the body (or corpus) before everything else is the ruling passion of their lives.

First produced in 1973, the permissive society is taken to task in this farcical comedy in which the characters, as stereotyped as their names (e.g. Canon Throbbing, Mrs Swabb) suggest, move - and indeed dance - in and out through a maze of mistaken identities and sexual encounters. As Wicksteed says, at the close, “He whose lust lasts, lasts longest.”