The Mammary Revival is a post-modern Jacobean tragedy, which is to say it is full of violent emotion and action, hatred, plotting, mistaken identity and revenge, with as many romances as murders, but also with good helping of anachronisms and a happy ending — not to mention a threat that "whoso fails to comprehend the plot shall hangèd be", which has been carried out on numerous occasions.

The plot has a number of obscurely related threads: the play is set in an unnamed Mediterranean sea-port against a background of the King's war against the Turks, and revolves around the fate of a valuable cargo of loam, threats to undermine the Crown, the secret of what befell the fair Rangoon before the action starts, and who is to blame for it all.

It is full of pithy sayings and characters on the edge of sanity.

Partly, this may be result of the play's genesis as a multi-authored work, each scene written by up to four contributors, none whom writes two consecutive lines. Partly, it may reflect the play's origin in Ben K. Webster's execrable 17th Century translation of Il Mammarone (which gives the play its popular title The Mammaroon).

Readers of great moral vigour or a sensitive disposition (or, God forbid, both!) are warned that the play depicts considerable cruelty to animals and an almost pathological obsession with the female breast.