Why pay your debts? When you can swindle everyone else instead!

Wonderfully boisterous, scurrilously funny and bitingly irreverent, A Family Affair is a stinging play about greed, corruption and the desire to climb the social ladder – whatever the cost. Written in 1850, A Family Affair caused such uproar that this remarkable and hilarious satire was banned for more than thirty years. The Russian government censor was heard to cry ‘the merchants are first rate villains, the dialogue is filthy; the entire play is an insult to the Russian merchant class!’