The play deals with one of the characters, Ronnie, who is trying to kill the Pope. Now if you wrote about trying to blow up the Pope in 1971, people would say, ‘Where do you get your ideas? It's bizarre…’. I went to see the play in 1981 at the Berkshire Theatre Festival just after the Pope had been shot, because I wondered what that event would do to the play. Would it make audiences gasp? What it did was strange. People used to look at the play in some skewed fashion and say, ‘Oh, what a kooky… what a funny…’. Suddenly, with the shooting of the Pope, I felt as if a protective wall had shattered and the audience had tumbled onto the same side of the mirror as the play, and I felt that their perception allowed them to see the characters' needs and hungers with much more directness than in 1971.