In Sore Throats, Howard Brenton has gone further than most of his contemporaries in exploring the intimate, bringing to bear on three fractured people in an unwelcoming South London flat, the social vision that sustains the broader, public canvas of his earlier work…. In the wake of divorce, Jack …, a chief inspector, has returned to see Judy … to claim half her money, and in so doing hits, kicks her and stamps on her head. Enter Sally … to look at the flat, knowing, because she works as a telephonist at the Evening Standard, that it is to be let. In Act 2, 18 months later, the two women are enjoying 'liberated' liberal sex with all-comers, especially 14-year-old-boys, and Jack returns again, this time from Canada, without having fulfilled his ambition to become a Mountie: his humiliation is rounded off with the closing declaration from Judy of her freedom from sexual and economic oppression….

The power balance and the decay are forcefully, brilliantly highlighted through Brenton's typically tough, vivid language, brutal, disturbing, intense and sometimes comic. But in Act 2, the bruising dialogue gives way to more self-conscious writing like Jack's story of his roadside birth after a motor car crash, as Brenton drifts into the fantasy of the women's so-called liberation and the empty, emotional gesture at the end when the lights go down on Judy about to burn her money and be 'fucked, happy and free'. Part one convinces because Brenton has found a theatrical expression for his perception of reality, despite Jack's stiff style …, whereas in the second act both the analysis and its dramatic realisation are shaky. The single bottle on the bare stage when the play opens compared to the forest of empties and other debris of the 'good life' at the beginning of Act 2, sums up the metaphor Brenton is struggling with—marriage today is a love desert, freedom means lots of fruit. It is as relevant to the state of Britain as … The Churchill Play (the speech on the nation is delivered by the force for change, Sally) and it would be unfair to expect Brenton to fully succeed where many others have not yet feared to tread. Hopefully, he and some of those others will take up this 'experiment in writing' which tackles the personal from a wider social dimension than is usual, seeing links between power, politics and love.