[1] In the play, Conservative, capitalist and contemporary left wing politics are merged and discredited, identified as middle-class in their nature and origin and hostile to working class interests.
Until that time Motton's major plays had been produced at either the Royal Court or Riverside Studios, Haymarket Theatre, Leicester, within eighteen months of being written.
Cat and Mouse (Sheep) was directed at the Théâtre De L'Europe à L'Odeon, Paris by Gregory Motton and Ramin Gray with actors Kevin McMonagle, Tony Rohr, Penelope Dimond and Patrick Bridgeman, in English.
Cat and Mouse (Sheep) is notable for its 'plague on both your houses' stance at a time when, in literary and arts organisations in general and the British theatre establishment in particular, a conventional, by then middle class, version of left-wingism was more or less taken for granted[9][10][11] and expressed though the choices made by the theatre and other managements[12][13][14] Motton's new work was now as unpopular with managements[15] as it had previously been with critics alike and the play was only able to be shown in Britain as part of a programme of "foreign" plays in a production financed by French money.
The plays also tended to adopt an accusing tone towards middle class consumers especially, charging them with hypocrisy and complicity in the exploitation of cheap labour in the Far East.
[34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41] The play introduces the character of Genghis Khan, an immigrant shopkeeper, an anti-hero with all the faults and attributes of a petty tyrant and a common man, constantly trying to gratify his lusts and greed, but whose very baseness is exceeded by the rapacity and ability to distort, of both capitalists and middle class leftwingers, who, to his annoyance and indignation, 'seem to have got there first'.
A British-Pakistani, shopkeeper, Gengis lives with his Irish uncle, 'a rather unpleasant middle aged man keen to follow every latest trend' and his English, prudish, greedy and lascivious maiden aunt.
Gengis' policies are parodies of mixtures of the worst excess of left and right, of capitalism and political correctness, inflicted with relish on a populace already suffering poverty, destitution and ignorance.
Roger Foss for What's On[42] however wrote: Its surely a sign of just how predictably parochial and whimpish British drama has become when Gregory Motton has to go to Paris to get this brilliant state of the nation play premiered.