Sally Hawkins's Jill is a masterclass in cringing middle-class repression, every brisk smile an agonised wince in disguise.
Kelman's conviction that standard English is a tool of anti-working-class repression is a central tenet of radical politics, but it seldom enters literary discourse.
While the play includes classic Rattigan elements like middle-class repression and marital infidelity, it is ultimately far more hopeful than, say, his "Deep Blue Sea".
It's a puerile, penis-fixated freak-fest that reeks so high of suburban, middle-class repression that had Sacha Baron Cohen ever walked into his office, Freud would have had to hold his nose while treating him.
There may be uses, too, in the middle-class repressions that made her so impatient in her youth, when her mother pretended not to see anything she didn't want to know.
"Tom and Viv" is fascinating and troubling, yet it is notable not for Vivien, but for her husband and his immersion in the dark side of the English upper middle class, whose repression matched his own perfectly and disastrously.
The settings and themes will be familiar to Dennis Potter enthusiasts: suburban living rooms, hospitals, remote woods in which unsettling dramas centred on alienation, class and repression are played out.
Betty Friedan's 1963 examination of middle-class female repression and despair helped ignite the contemporary women's movement.
Sher, working with the wonderful scenic designer Michael Yeargan and the choreographer Christopher Gattelli, makes a show, in this scene, of upper-class English repression.
Halfway through "A Strange Stirring," the social historian Stephanie Coontz — parsing the reception of "The Feminine Mystique," Betty Friedan's 1963 examination of middle-class female repression and despair — confesses to feeling some ambivalence over Friedan's project, and hence her own.
