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Peter Shaffer has produced a well-knit story of family life brought to
the verge of disaster on the rocks of intellectual snobbery. The conflict
is between, on the one hand, a self-made business man so completely
immersed in his own success that he can see no other future for his
son, on the verge of a university career and with artistic inclinations,
and on the other, the wife, of part-French extraction, an intellectual
snob of the most advanced kind. And between them, the sensitive
young man, who is used by both as a weapon in the domestic conflict,
and the unsophisticated fourteen-year-old daughter, who bouyantly
rides the storms. Plunged into the midst of this tense family
atmosphere is an earnest young German tutor, struggling to find,
somewhere in this troubled situation, the family life of which he has so
far been deprived.