Laurence Olivier Presents Episode Rating Graph

Alan Pinter's masterly play of suspense, set in the fashionable world of Chelsea boutique owners and West End dress designers, takes a moment in which four elegant lives are suddenly shaken by the tremors of sexual jealousy. The sinister telephone call which disturbs Harry Kane at four o'clock in the morning and sets in motion the drama's events, also foreshadows the ominous deepening mystery in which the characters find themselves.

Set on the plantation of a rich Mississippi cotton grower, Tennessee Williams' play deals with the smouldering conflicts that suddenly erupt during Big Daddy's birthday celebrations when the family learns that he is close to death. In a shattering night of revelation, each member of the family, imprisoned by avarice, envy and self-delusion, is forced to face reality. Brick, escaping life in drink, Maggie, desperate with frustration in her loveless marriage, and Big Daddy and Big Mama, hopelessly denying the fact of death , find themselves at last speaking the terrifying truth.

Millworker Chris Hawthorn and his wife are shocked to discover that their daughter Fanny did not, after all, spend her holiday weekend in Blackpool with her friend Mary. Instead, she spent it in Wales with Alan Jeffcote, son of the owner of the mill where she and her father are both employed. And in 1912, when the play is set, there was only one solution for young men and women who spent weekends together without troubling to get married first. But the conventional morals and manners of a North of England mill town are rudely upset by the behaviour of a single young lady with ideas about women and about life far ahead of their time.