In South Africa a coloured slum-school principal and a white librarian are in love – a love prohibited under the state’s Immorality Act. They’re caught and arrested, but the play’s focus is not on the arrest itself but on the couple and the shadow between them – a crippling one stripping them of their dignity and self-respect. Theirs is not only a forbidden love that must be hidden, but one so fragile and painful due to conditions not of their making. After the arrest, they alternately perform a kind of piteous psychological stripping of themselves and finally the coloured man wrenchingly describes the complete moral devastation the state has inflicted on him and his people.
