Like Owners, Caryl Churchill's [Objections to Sex and Violence] carries a portmanteau title. It is a danger sign. Ownership is a fascinating and timely theme, opening up a perspective of multiple ironies on the possession of property and the possession of people. Likewise sex and violence…. But meanwhile, who are the people in the play and what happens to them?

To this question Miss Churchill returns a flimsy and long-winded answer. We are on a beach … where Jule, a taciturn urban terrorist, has retired with a boyfriend after being named in a conspiracy charge. What makes a nice girl start blowing people up? I imagine this question was on the author's mind at some stage of the play's composition; but we never find out. Nor do we discover why, having gone into hiding, Jule should have peppered her acquaintances with holiday postcards.

But however improbable their arrival, all the visitors come under the umbrella of the title. To start with, there is sister Annie, who seems to be living the kind of life that caused Jule's rebellion; an executive sex-object, who gets even more inanimate treatment when she junks the typewriter and enrolls as a house cleaner for Mr Big's wife….

Annie, fresh from five years of marital battering, is accompanied by a docile lover who responds to every verbal challenge with dithering equivocation. Others on the scene are a miserable pair of middle-aged Festival of Lighters, the woman scanning the seascape for likely rapists, the man diving into a porno magazine as soon as she turns her back. Then there is a lonely old lady from Watford … against whom the husband directs a furtive assault: and, right at the end, Jule's Communist husband, who arrives primed with ideological weapons.

It is all there: liberalism, the National Front, hard-line Socialism, and the terrorist ethic (if that is the word). But theatrically speaking who cares? I suspect that even Miss Churchill does not care very much, as what gets spoken about on stage differs totally from what happens. So far as events and immediate feelings are concerned we are back in the traditional feminine world where personal relationships are all and everything would work out satisfactorily if men would only behave properly….

Jule is confined to holding the rest of the company at arm's length and striding about masterfully in a bathing suit, until faced with the recurring question: "Do you remember how …?" at which, unfortunately, her defences are apt to crumble. This is a difficult time for playwrights; but I doubt whether anything is to be gained from going through the motions of writing about important issues when one has nothing to say.