Softcops: in a surreal, part-comic part-profound drama of ideas, Churchill renders Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish into an intelligent, entertaining play about state control. Vidocq is the trickster who is made Chief of Police, his criminal methods making him the very best of detectives. Lacenaire, an ineffectual poet-criminal, is made into a celebrity while the regicide is hidden out of sight. Pierre, adjusting the black and red ribbons on a scaffold for maximum educative effect, dreams of a Garden of Laws where every punishment for every crime is displayed to frighten the population into obedience. But the seed is sown when Jeremy Bentham shows Pierre that surveillance is much more disconcerting than spectacle. In Fen, laborers are bound to the land. These women pick out stones from the fields, dig up potatoes, and bag onions. Their lives are determined by the farmers and faceless conglomerates who buy up the land--economic transactions which keep the villagers in poverty. One woman, Val, can no longer bear the dreary life she is in. She finds happiness with Frank, and the two leave their respective spouses to be with each other. But her new romance is not all Val hoped for; she is miserable without her children, but it is financially impossible for her to bring them with her. While Val and Frank try to negotiate the emotional turmoil of their relationship, the other villagers around them struggle to find happiness and meaning in their own lives: Shirley resolves to be happy with domestic monotony, Angela tortures her stepdaughter Becky, Nell agitates the farmers and landowners, and Alice seeks salvation with the local Baptist church. The bleakness and history of the fens permeates the villagers’ lives, and the ghosts of the past haunt their hopes for the future.