What went wrong in both plays was that the writers failed to graft a personal story onto a great historical one. There was no connection that one could feel between the story of the lovers in Her Naked Skin and the dramatic sweep of the suffragette movement, starting with the death of Emily Davison under the King's horse at the Derby.
There's no reason, within this drama, why they should be lesbian, particularly, although given the feminist and revolutionary context they could well have been. But their predicament seems to be that the neurotic Lady Celia simply tires of her unsophisticated young lover, with almost no reference to any wider social inspiration or pressure.
In rather the same way with Liberty, there's a disjunction between the personal and the political. As the hero is little more than a cipher, he cannot lead the audience into the spirit of the times: there's barely any connection between his inner life and the outer life of the drama, since he doesn't display one. The minor characters are more interesting, and the spectacle of the actress Rosa alone after the Terror - betrayed and exhausted, with a red thread around her neck to remind her of the man she lost to Madame Guillotine - is a powerful moment. But there aren't enough of them.
One really can feel more pity and terror about both these subjects from reading books and letters, or from watching documentaries
