However, despite all the ambition and talent lavished upon both these plays, neither succeeded in touching me very much. Admittedly the scene in Her Naked Skin of a young woman prisoner being illegally force-fed by tube was very shocking: it was a kind of rape, which made some of the victims permanently ill and killed several; it reminded me very painfully of the heroic courage of the suffragettes, half-­forgotten now, and the astonishing brutality that men are capable of showing to women, almost without thinking. What failed to engage me, for all its passionate moments, was the central love affair; it drifted, inexplicably, into an unconvincing ending.

As for Liberty, the priggish young idealist at its centre, who turns into a terrifying mass murderer, was both repellent and unconvincing from beginning to end. He meant nothing; the playwright gave him no humanity at all. Nor did I feel for one instant the disorientating terror of those times; somehow the entire play is emotionally numb. And as for offering a better understanding of the French Revolution or of the suffragettes - clearly one of the main ambitions of both plays - one could in both cases learn far more from the programme notes, which are well worth reading.

In Liberty the bold attempt of using blank verse (it's notoriously hard to write drama in verse; even T.S. Eliot failed) might have been a way of catching the elusive quality peculiar to theatre, and the playwright Glyn Maxwell is a successful poet as well as a dramatist. Yet in this case it seemed to add (or detract) very little. Asked about the function of verse in the play, Maxwell replied in the programme notes: "Verse on stage has nothing to do with lyrical uplift, or the past, or mystery. It's right here, now. I happen to believe the verse-line - specifically the flexible five-beat line you find in poets like Robert Frost and Edward Thomas - is a truer way of sounding the note of the passing moment than prose is. Verse includes the ending of the breath (in the life as well as in the line), the pressure of silence, the gesture towards memorability?.?.?."