[Softcops is] a desperately serious treatise, (and to emphasise that, there's no interval) about crime, punishment and male society. Set in 19th-century France, it features our old, ambiguous friend Vidocq …, master-crook turned top cop, and thus Miss Churchill—one of our very best playwrights—can debate as she will whether hierarchical society is responsible for the criminal, or the criminal for forcing society to punish him.

The trouble is that the play is more illustrated lecture than drama, though lots of 'dramatic' things happen. A thief is obliged to hold up for the mob to see, his right hand, painted red; then it's cut off. (p. 27)

Miss Churchill, I suspect unfortunately, read Michel Foucault's Surveiller et Punir and so impressed was she by Foucault's ideas that they have taken over and devoured the play she might have written. The book, apparently, analyses the way in which we used...