A Nice Clean Sheet of Paper (1964) features a talkative and condescending job interviewer (played by Donald Wolfit) whose attempts to communicate with an unresponsive applicant (John Wood) drive him to incoherent blathering.
[1] Evelyn (1969), which starred Ian Richardson and Pauline Collins as a couple trapped in an extra-marital and over-crowded affair, won the RAI Prize for Literary and Dramatic Programmes at the Prix Italia and was later adapted for television.
Consisting largely of a conversation between a middle-aged married couple troubled by the trend towards social realism in television drama, the play won the Giles Cooper Award for outstanding writing for radio.
As a mark of his status as a playwright, Adrian's plays throughout the 1980s boasted casts made up of distinguished actors – including, among others, John Gielgud (Passing Time; 1983), Michael Aldridge (Outpatient; 1985) and Peter Vaughn (Toytown; 1987).
In No Charge for the Extra Service (1979), the bereaved central characters, Elizabeth Spriggs and Nigel Stock, brought together by a dating agency, converse in a formal, almost artificial manner that belies the uncomfortable and disturbing truths they reveal about themselves throughout the course of the play.
"The Man" in Evelyn desperately wants his declarations of love towards his mistress to be acknowledged, while Hugh Burden's disturbed mental patient in 1981's Passing Through attempts to piece together his broken past by engaging lonely signalman Patrick (Harry Towb) in meandering conversation.
This is also explored in Watching the Plays Together, which examines the relationship between audience and playwright by creating an imaginary dialogue between the two, balancing the fine line between fiction and reality and providing the listener with an active role in the drama instead of a passive one.