Tooth and Claw

Paperback

Published 1984

Is ravine really the natural state of the world, red in tooth and claw as Tennyson’s poem says? Or can love after all be the law of creation? Love, in the form of social responsibility, has begun to trouble the mind of Oliver West, who has been knocked into thought by a mugging in the street. And while Oliver’s apparently successful career as a solicitor stumbles over the relationship between law and morality, legal ethics and social ethics, Greg McGee allows us to glimpse in the city outside the protected law office the have-nots beginning to use their claws…

This challenging play pulls no punches as it puts to the test the comfortable but too often unexamined assumptions on which our urban social structure rests.

‘McGee shows that when justice and morality become mere words, society will disintegrate and no one will escape. He makes us concerned for society, which is to say, for ourselves.’
—Graham Adams, New Outlook