Young, idealistic Selby wants to “do good” so she quits her secretarial job in a large corporation and begins to work for that corporation’s charity branch. As she negotiates her new world of the business side of charity, she plunges into an Alice-in-Wonderland-like adventure – and embarks on a quest to separate politics from charity.

Originally written for television, The After-Dinner Joke was first aired on BBC 1 in 1978. 35 years later, Caryl Churchill’s wicked satire of the politics of charity and the absence of charity in politics has lost none of its relevance or bite. Whistler’s five-actor cast takes on the more than 60 characters and 50 locations in an anarchic, Monty Python-inspired whirlwind.