But in the American feel-good milieu you wouldn't know it: "We're coming out if it".
This play's romantic collisions and political skullduggery, it turns out, slide right nicely into a cowboy milieu: good guys are run out of town by bullying villains, then fancy folk join the rustics wandering lovelorn through the untamed landscape.
Other current patrons of Maggie's include the broadcasters Jon Snow and Kirsty Wark, the architects Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers, and the famously well-connected artist Sam Taslor-Wood; as in her Hobsbawm Macaulay days, Sarah Brown was moving in a milieu where good works and good contacts overlapped.
The cage is just the milieu.
"Dr. T and the Women" uses its affluent milieu to good comic effect, but it's mellower and more forgiving than these movies, and less interested in social criticism than in the celebration of human foible.
"I have a pretty good team in this particular milieu," Brady said.
The only other writer who is as good at chronicling our contemporary milieu, in which the world of things eats itself like an ouroboros, is Douglas Coupland.
That was until what he calls "the proverbial aha moment," a dinner at Jewel Bako, the exquisite sushi restaurant in the East Village, where he first experienced the beauty of good sake in its natural milieu.
These provided Leonard with his true milieu: street-hardened good guys doing battle against mean and fearless bad guys, not in order to restore the moral order, but as the only way to stay alive in the wildernesses of Miami and Detroit, his preferred locations.
Good communication practices between sex workers and researchers can be fostered in a milieu in which the challenges of stigma are recognized and addressed.
"Getting rid of a milieu that is not good for you, as Vincent did, is very familiar to me," he replies.
