Max and Lenny exchange sharp insults in the living room of a North London family home on a summer evening.

Sam arrives home from chauffeuring an American client and immediately becomes the target of Max's mockery and abuse.

Joey arrives home from boxing training and Max belittles his fighting technique and future prospects as a professional boxer.

Teddy and Ruth let themselves into the family house late at night, unknown to the sleeping household.

Ruth returns from an evening stroll, meets Lenny downstairs, and their conversation quickly becomes flirtatious and charged.

Teddy and Ruth walk into the living room the following morning, revealing their presence and shocking the whole family.

Max calls Ruth a slut and orders Joey to remove both Teddy and Ruth from the house.

Max strikes Joey and Sam with his walking stick before abruptly turning affectionate and reconciling with Teddy.

Over cigars after lunch, Max describes his late wife Jessie as the moral backbone of the family.

Teddy urges Ruth to cut the visit short and leave immediately, but she resists, and he goes upstairs to pack alone.

Lenny invites Ruth to dance, and the two begin kissing as a helpless Teddy stands watching with the luggage.

Joey draws Ruth onto the sofa and lies on top of her while Lenny caresses her hair.

Teddy delivers a speech insisting that his academic career and education separate him entirely from his family's way of life.

Lenny reveals he is a pimp and proposes setting Ruth up as a sex worker in a Soho flat.

Ruth negotiates improved terms, agrees to stay with the family, and bids Teddy a cool farewell as he departs.

Max rules a dysfunctional North London household shared with his brother Sam and sons Lenny and Joey, where every interaction bristles with insults, threats, and barely contained violence. When eldest son Teddy returns from America with his wife Ruth — a woman the family has never met — their surprise arrival triggers an explosive confrontation before Max grudgingly accepts the visitors. Over the following day, Ruth becomes increasingly drawn into the household's orbit while Teddy grows desperate to escape with her. As Lenny and Joey openly pursue Ruth before her husband's eyes, Teddy retreats into defensive intellectual posturing rather than intervening. The men devise a plan to keep Ruth as both homemaker and sex worker, and Teddy, shockingly, raises no objection. Teddy departs alone, leaving Ruth in command of a household whose patriarch ends the play kneeling before her, begging for affection she has no intention of giving.

The core story of a family's violent unraveling when Teddy brings his wife home.

Max recalls his days working at a racetrack and boasts of his skill at picking horse-race winners.

Max threatens to evict Sam from the house if Sam ever retires and stops contributing money to the household.

The opening scene closes with Max in fond reverie, recalling his own father lifting him high into the air.

Sam's satisfied American passenger tips him with a box of expensive cigars after being driven to the airport.

Ruth steps outside alone for a late-night walk to get fresh air after arriving at the house with Teddy.

Lenny recounts a story to Ruth about beating a diseased sex worker he had briefly considered murdering.

Lenny tells Ruth a second violent anecdote about striking an old woman who had asked him to move a heavy mangle.

Lenny calls up the stairs after Ruth as she heads to bed, accidentally waking the sleeping Max.

Joey refuses his father's demand to throw Teddy and Ruth out of the family house.

Max praises Teddy's doctorate and choice of wife and wonders aloud whether Teddy's three young sons miss their parents.

Lenny steers the conversation toward philosophical questions about the Church, but Teddy deflects every question politely.

Max, Lenny, and Joey head out to the boxing gym together, leaving Teddy and Ruth alone in the house.

Lenny returns home early and Ruth recalls her former career as a model before she married Teddy.

Joey comes downstairs and reports to the assembled men that he did not have sex with Ruth.

Max grows sentimental and presses a photograph of himself on Teddy to take back and show Max's grandchildren.

Before Teddy and Ruth's arrival, Max's household is already crumbling under the weight of petty cruelties, wounded pride, and nostalgia for a more secure past. Sam's modest satisfaction in a job well done stands in quiet contrast to Max's relentless bullying, while Max's tender memory of his own father hints at the affection buried beneath his brutality. Ruth's late-night encounter with Lenny establishes her as a woman who cannot be easily dominated, as she listens to his violent stories without flinching and redirects the conversation on her own terms. The following morning, Joey's refusal to expel Teddy and Ruth prevents an immediate eruption, and small acts of hospitality — cigars after lunch, a philosophical chat — give the household a deceptive air of normality. As the plot to keep Ruth thickens, telling details accumulate: her confession about a modeling career she gave up, Joey's admission about his time alone with her upstairs, and Max's sentimental gesture of pressing a photograph on the son he is about to lose again.

The smaller moments and background details that shape the family's fractured world.

Max refers to his dead wife Jessie as a bitch with a rotten face during a quarrel with Lenny.

Max taunts Sam by insinuating he uses his employer's car for sexual encounters with female passengers.

Lenny invokes memories of Max as a tender father in their youth, but Max responds only with scorn.

Lenny is woken by a mysterious ticking noise and comes downstairs, where he briefly encounters Teddy.

Ruth unsettles Lenny by offering herself if he takes her water glass, saying if he takes it she will go with him.

Ruth laughs at Lenny's confusion after daring him to lie on the floor so she can pour water down his throat.

Lenny wakes Max in the night and asks him point-blank how Max and Jessie conceived Lenny.

Max and Sam argue heatedly over Sam's failure to follow their father into the butchery trade.

Max invites Joey to join him at a football match, but Joey chooses his boxing training instead.

Max abruptly switches from praising Jessie as the family's moral guide to calling her a slutbitch.

Sam departs for work as Max unleashes a barrage of insults questioning his driving ability and sexuality.

Max hits on the idea of asking Ruth to stay and fill the domestic void left by Jessie's death.

Teddy informs Ruth that the family wants her to stay, adding that he personally raises no objection.

Sam interrupts the family's scheming to reveal that the admired MacGregor once slept with Jessie in Sam's car, then collapses.

Max falls to his knees begging Ruth for a kiss as Lenny and Joey stand impassively over him and the fallen Sam.

From its opening exchanges, the play signals its moral instability through Max's wildly contradictory attitude toward Jessie, swinging between reverence and contempt in the same breath. Ruth's late-night confrontation with Lenny marks the first major power shift of the evening, as she refuses the submissive role he expects and turns his own provocations back on him. Lenny's shocking late-night question to his father about his own conception reveals the full depth of the family's dysfunction and the erasure of any real parental bond. In Act Two, Max's abrupt reversal from praising Jessie's memory to insulting it lays bare how little genuine feeling underlies any of his pronouncements. The scheme to keep Ruth as a sex worker accelerates rapidly once Teddy offers no resistance, and Sam's long-suppressed revelation about Jessie's affair with MacGregor shatters the household's founding myth before he collapses to the floor. The play ends with the power structure completely inverted: Max, who opened the play dominating every room, kneels begging for affection from a woman who has outmanoeuvred them all.

The key reversals, discoveries, and confessions that shift the play's power at every turn.