[2] The play tells the story of Kate Elliot's unhappy suburban South London family and the domestic havoc wrought when she decides to adopt George Dillon as a surrogate son.

In common with Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, George Dillon is an intelligent man unable to find his place in the world.

[3] It opened professionally at the Royal Court Theatre on 11 February 1958, in a production by William Gaskill, with the following cast (in order of appearance):[4] In The Observer, Kenneth Tynan called it "Powerful, honest and transfixing"; while in The Sunday Times, Harold Hobson wrote that the play "absorbs and fascinates because it is that rarest of theatrical phenomena, a realistic modern drama which is not bourgeois in its underlying assumptions.

[6][7] Another version by new management and separately-financed opened during the same season on 12 January 1959, again starring Craig but was also a commercial failure playing for 48 performances, and closing on 21 February 1959.

[2] A successful West End revival of the play ran at the Comedy Theatre from 27 September 2005 until 14 January 2006, directed by Peter Gill and starring Joseph Fiennes, Francesca Annis and Anne Reid.