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DUSA, FISH, STAS & VI Pam Gems This remarkable and highly regarded play deals with four young women who, for various reasons, are living apart from their lovers or husbands, while trying to pull together the shattered strands of their lives.

The scene is an unpretentious London flat, where four young women, on their own for various reasons, have come together. Dusa, who returns as the play begins, laments the loss of her children, who have been abducted by her estranged husband; Fish, an upper-class intellectual and "women's libber," finds herself rejected by the one man she can truly love; Stas, a nurse and part-time hustler, regards men - and life - with a cynicism so bitter as to be suspect; while Vi, a zany "flower child," withdraws into Zen, pills and starvation diets. In a series of revealing, inventive scenes, sometimes hilarious, sometimes deeply affecting, the four endeavour to help each other in pulling their lives together and in finding the sense of purpose and individuality. which can so easily elude women in contemporary society. The end result, like life itself, is mixed - a degree of success for three of the friends, and tragedy for the fourth.