The three young men were trying to get to grips with a troubling scene in which they lark about with a baby in its pram, poking it, pulling off its nappy, goading each other until they stone it to death.

The people who are killing the baby are doing it to gain their self-respect, because they want to assert human values.What means does civilization make use of to hold in check the aggressiveness that opposes it, to make it harmless, perhaps to get rid of it? Such an assurance (that the playwright is not intending to depict ‘real people’ but rather symbolic figures of an impoverished, disadvantaged generation) works to absolve the playwright, and director, of any accusation of misogyny or class prejudice.

Sanderson also explains what occurs during the phenomenon known as “gradual escalation” (30), writing that, “Another reason we often go along when we are being urged to do something that we know to be wrong is because the situation gets more extreme little by little. So it wasn’t the act of violence that was important but the context it was put into, the consequences that came from this violence and the sort of society which the violence indicated. Len’s hypothetical defence is the “diffusion of responsibility” and the fact that Fred, the last attacker, does appear to deliver the killer blow to the baby.In this light, Len is the glue holding together the working-class society in which he lives since he is the model citizen who does not utilize violence to settle grievances but offers instead help and support. Sanderson explains how “moral rebels … have relatively little concern about fitting in with the crowd and are not afraid to speak up in support of their beliefs and values” (217). What Bond suggests is that we have created a coarse, brutal world in which linguistic vacancy leads to moral indifference. For example, Maddy Costa provides a quote from Irving Wardle of the Times’ who said of the characters in the play – “these people spoke like urban cavemen.