Abstract
Howard Barker's ideologically challenging and speculative play uncompromisingly examines the conflicting relationship between moral respnsibility and personal ambition, revealing the way in which rhetoric has blatantly usurped truth and replaced it with the spin of the dominant ideology of the day - a spin that sees "truth" as a series of political negotiations. Moving through twenty scenes that include seven locations, one of which is a prison that is almost entirely black, the pragmatic structure of the play reinforces its central theme, namely, that everything (truth included) is fictional according to the particular frame that constructed it.