The plays are set exclusively in Yorkshire exteriors and are designed to be performed by only two actors in multiple roles over eight consecutive evenings, though this has never been done anywhere. Each of the plays has two endings, making 16 variations in all. Smoking , which adapts the first three plays, charts events that ensue at regularly spaced intervals after a housewife decides one morning in early summer to smoke a single cigarette. No Smoking , which adapts the final three plays, also leapfrogs across time to show the apparent consequences of her decision not to smoke the same cigarette. The amount of time that lapses between scenes begins at five seconds, then shifts to five days, five weeks, and five years.
Different decisions made at each juncture eventually lead to a dozen separate conclusions.
Both films center on an alcoholic headmaster, Toby Teasdale, and his shy wife Celia, and their interactions with, among others, the school's night watchman, Lionel Hepplewick, and a housekeeper, Sylvie Bell. Because some English and American viewers find their highly stylized and deliberately stagy French versions of English characters and settings difficult to swallow. We can't know what the French response to Quills will be, because the film is opening here only this week. But I'd be surprised if many French viewers could process its characters, settings, and premises without blanching. Paraphrasing Combs, one might say that this isn't Sade reinterpreted as an American hero, but Sade speaking English while still pretending to be French.