Storey's essential point is this play "Ferma" (The farm) is that the family is an entity that surmounts and sustains its component members. There is a price to pay. The warming hug of fondness and care may be too snug for comfort, like the coils of a boa constrictor.

The Yorkshire farm family of this drama seems to be strangling in quasi-incestuous domesticity. The father  is a grizzled apostle of the work ethic and a drinkis heavily. His three daughters have been properly educated (two are teachers), but the experience has been enervating rather than elevating. The eldest is a creature of broody, caustic resignation. The middle sister  is a sexual tease who refuses to settle for any one man. The youngest is a political firebrand who posts placards of revolt in her bedroom.

The mother , a harried peacemaker, has taken up night courses in sociology, anthropology and psychology. Here Storey draws a distinct line between the instinctual blood force represented by the father and arid attempts to control and explain existence through the disciplines of rationality.

The return of a feckless rebel son and would-be poet stirs embers of memory and excitation in the whole family. The source of his father's greatest hopes and deepest hurt, the boy has come home to announce that he is marrying a middle-aged mother of two whom he will introduce to them. But the event never occurs. After a poisonously bitter quarrel between father and son, the boy leaves home again. Yet a closing breakfast scene clinches Storey's point that the family will go on as immutably as the sun rises and night falls.