The play's style is bare. It holds little of the undulating, heaving swell of Othello's music, the fireworks of Julius Caesar, the fine frenzies of Lear or Macbeth … Rather there is here a swift channeling, an eddying, twisting, and forthward-flowing stream; ice cold, intellectual, cold as a mountain torrent and holding something of its iron taste … There is little brilliance, little colour.

The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of these as well. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has an invariably public dimension.