DEBORAH LEVY wrote Pax as the result of a commission from the Women's Theatre Group to write an ‘anti-nuclear’ play. In her own words, she detests ‘those last-two-minutes-in-a-bunker-type scenarios’, so she decided to write an epic play with Europe in the twentieth century as a focal point. Pax takes on board Europe's past, present, and future. There are four women characters in the play, The Keeper, The Hidden Daughter, The Mourner, and The Domesticated Woman. In the published edition of Pax (Plays by Women, Vol. VI, ed. Mary Remnant, Methuen, 1987), Levy describes how she envisaged these characters:

I found four archetypes, who represented twentieth-century Europe for me.