Richard and Sarah are a seemingly ordinary couple, thoroughly bourgeois and conventional. He works in a London office. She is a housewife. Not all is as it appears. But both Sarah and Richard are having extra-marital affairs. With a twist in the plot Pinter reveals the truth behind their behaviour. The play is not a judgement, nor is it a critique of the free-love and avant-garde lifestyles emerging in the 1960s but a comic satire on the failed communication and lost simplicity of a love grown stale in the repetitive boredom of modern living.