Ruth Galley & Trevor Cox
Mel is a well paid executive of a fancy New York company which has suddenly hit the skids and started to pare the payroll. Anxiety doesn't help. Mel, too, gets the axe. His wife takes a job to tide them over, then she too is sacked. As if this weren't enough, Mel is fighting a losing battle with the very environs of life. Polluted air is killing everything that grows on his terrace; the walls of the high rise apartment are paper thin, so that the private lives of a pair of German stewardesses next door are open books to him; the apartment is burgled; and his psychiatrist dies with $23,000 of his money. Mel does the only thing left for him to do; he has a nervous breakdown. The play was subsequently produced by RSC in 2000. |