[Magnificence is] a social drama in a rougher mode than [those] of the English 1950s.

The play begins with a scene showing a number of young people—several of the working class, an uneducated hippie and a girl emigrated from the BBC—who break into an unoccupied flat as a protest against a housing situation that allows landlords to hold out for high rents while the poor are left virtually homeless. But the police come to evict the "squatters," and though they meet with very little resistance, one of the young women who is pregnant is knocked down and, we later learn, miscarries.

Except for the moment of violence at its end, the tone of the first scene is light enough. (p. 124)

[In later scenes, we learn] that the young man whose wife was struck down by the policeman … has just come out of jail, where he was...