The play features many of the themes or motifs that run through Barnes's work, including betrayal, familial relations, regression and transgression.

[1] The play tells the story of the reunion of Augusta Hobbs, her brother, Jonathan Burley, and her four estranged adult children: Dudley, Elisha, Miranda and Jeremy.

The play begins with the arrival at Burley Hall of Miranda, a 'tall woman in her late fifties', and a coachman, Jack Blow, that she has met in Dover during her journey to England from France.

The building has not been occupied for some time and is in a state of dilapidation thanks to German bombing campaigns; the house's former contents are sprawled all over the set.

Miranda is shortly joined by her uncle, Jonathan Burley, as well as her two brothers, Dudley, a manufacturer of watches and Elisha, a publicist, and later by her mother, Augusta.

Dudley and Elisha exhibit a strong dislike for Miranda and their mother, playing a number of increasingly cruel and violent tricks upon them.

Nonetheless, he enlisted the poet and critic Edwin Muir to read the manuscript, who claimed the play "a work of genius and utterly absurd.

Barnes's correspondence in her archive at the University of Maryland reveals that she often was contacted with requests to stage the play, but she invariably turned them down.

Not spoken language; Miss Barnes has no ear for the stage, but the intricate, rich, almost viciously brilliant discourse, modeled more or less on the murkier post-Elizabethans."

In the Times Literary Supplement, the anonymous reviewer suggested that "[t]here will always be one or two eccentrics who think 'The Antiphon' gives its author first place among women who have written verse in the English language.