[Daughters of Men is] a very good example of Orton's black, farcical style. A neat flight of fancy puts authority, the family, class divisions and the church under one roof, as it were, at a holiday camp, where Peter Vaughan presides over the grotesqueries of chalet life with vicious paternalism. A raucous competition in the main hall gets badly out of hand and anarchy spreads as infuriated campers savage the redcoats, rape lady entertainers and finally march on the inner sanctum where Erpingham waits in morning-dress, flanked by the padre and a portrait of the Queen.

Apart from an overlong diversion—probably introduced in the re-write—when a camp entertainment is presented in a way that makes the audience become the punters, Orton's pacing is invariably effective. He always had a perfect ear for pompous circumlocution and for the strangled diction of received clichés. The spite is...