Two Immorality Plays

The two plays in this collection ring fascinating new changes on the well-worn contrast between a writer's life and work.

The biographical play The Pimp is an elegant dance of death for four characters: the poet Charles Baudelaire, his mixed-race mistress Jeanne Duval, his respectable but repressed mother and his hypocritical legal adviser. Each of them has a part to play in the poetry as well as the tragedy of Baudelaire's life.

In the brilliant, often surreal Solitude , the blocked writer Trecci (a character loosely based on the novelist Alexander Trocchi) wishes to be left alone on his barge, only stepping out for a riotous visit to the pub and an occasional sexual encounter with his neighbour's one-legged wife. But when his only friend brings round a potential conquest - an attractive young man who turns out to be an attractive young woman - Trecci is unwillingly drawn back into the world outside.