One for the Road is an almost farcical comedy about one dinner party too many, as Dennis loses patience with domesticity and makes a break for the freedom of the open road.

Dennis and Pauline live in a bungalow in Phase Two of a northern housing estate, and are serving hachis a parmentier to their guests Jane and Roger. Pauline is very pleased about this. Dennis is less enthusiastic – he will be forty tomorrow, feels like he is wasting his life, and would rather they just called it cottage pie. Outside, Dennis’s parents are lost on the estate, and vandals are decapitating garden gnomes and obscenely vandalising vegetables.

As Dennis’s anarchic streak reveals itself, what was supposed to be an impeccably middle-class dinner becomes a first-class row about middle age, affairs, and what’s locked in the bureau.

Russell’s hilarious and sharply observed play was first performed at the Lyric Theatre, London in 1987.