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Jennie Lee Theatre, Bletchley

1984

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I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

Bleakly Comic Stage Play'

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Notes: winner of the Milton Keynes February Festival playwriting competition, 1983

Synopsis: Martin is a forcibly retired A' level geology lecturer living with his wife Grace in a small cottage in the Cotswolds. Embittered, vindictive and emotionally impotent, Martin takes pleasure in working his way systematically through the Birmingham phone book and making insolent or abusive phone calls. Grace, meanwhile - homely, indulgent and excessively 'wifey' - amuses herself by spying on their neighbours bedroom with a telescope. As the play progresses and Martin becomes more and more empty it grows clear that he has always wanted to leave Grace but has never had the guts. Grace for her part gradually emerges as a woman who is not as green as, to her husband's eye, she is cabbage looking and we see that much of her wifeyness has been a deliberate and successful attempt to bind him to her. And so as Martin, ever the coward, cannot leave Grace he attempts, via drunken Russian Roulette with an army revolver, to provoke her into leaving him. But Grace, always a step ahead, flares only briefly before swaddling him with her lovingness again and we finally leave him in the blank despair of one who sees no other prospect than to watch himself grow old and die, as Grace prepares him the symbollically castrating 'nice cup of tea' . They deserve each other.