Knowing her apprenticeship in radio, I hope it doesn't seem too easy a cavil to say that Caryl Churchill's [Objections to Sex and Violence] feels more like a chamber work for voices than a fully realised dramatic event in a medium-sized theatre. Several commentators have noted an uneasiness about the setting up of the duologues which are the play's mode, a lack of conviction in the sheer mechanics of pushing a pair of speakers on and off. Conceived as a radio work, the play would easily shed these minor impediments and the more elusive, perhaps more fundamental problem of its not fully resolved dependence on a setting that is and is not formalised, particular. The lack of conviction that I find is spatial.

The text itself takes the form of a sort of double lobster-quadrille around two Alices, one a young woman extricated from marriage to a down-the-line...