Perkins is a professor of twentieth-century American and British literature and film. In the following essay, she traces the causes and consequences of the main character's mental breakdown.

John Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence opens with a dream or rather a nightmare in which Bill Maitland struggles to defend himself in court against charges that he has “unlawfully and wickedly published . . . a wicked, bawdy and scandalous object”: himself. When Bill claims in this opening scene that he is innocent of these charges, the audience assumes that during the rest of the play, he will try to defend that innocence. Yet after Bill emerges from his dream, he spends the next two days proving the opposite as he alienates his family, colleagues, clients, office workers, and mistress. The growing sense of his inability to establish strong connections with anyone and thus to find some kind of moral stability throws him...