Lewis Riley is a young man with relationship issues. He and his girlfriend, Lucy, are bickering alot, and although they love each other, definitely need to learn how to trust, and this is putting an enormous strain on their relationship. It doesn't help that their mutual "friend" Nick has taken it upon himself to flirt shamelessly with Lucy under the guise of making sure she is going to stay faithful to Lewis. Nick is rather a negative presence in Lewis' life, although Lewis doesn't realize it yet. Nick is a political activist and as such has a habit of wearing someone down with pressure until they give in and he gets what he wants. This is the offensive he launches on Lucy.
As well as a personal life in turmoil, Lewis also has no job and no clear idea of what he wants to do with his life. In order to continue to get unemployment he needs to show that he is actively applying for jobs, but he never hears anything from the companies and organizations he applies to. He doesn't even really care what he does, because he just needs the money. This changes one day when he actually gets one of the jobs he applies for - a drama teacher, and play director, at a nearby hospital for the mentally ill.
Lewis has to hit the ground running; on his first day he learns that he is going to be directing the hospital's patients in a production of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte. This is surprising, because it is a complex and mutli-faceted Italian opera, and it is also daunting, for exactly the same reason. The opera is performed in Italian, which is an uphill task for Lewis because his prospective cast speak only English. He is also mistaken for one of the patients, when one of the staff members asks him what ward he is usually in. This is not a very auspicious start.
Lewis finds a varying degree of enthusiasm between cast members; he first meets Roy, who has chosen the play because he wants to recreate an idyll of love that he never experienced in his childhood. Roy seems to feel that he should be directing the play and not Lewis; he criticizes him constantly and finds fault with everything that he does. Roy is bipolar, and he loves theater, which results in a kind of theater mania that he is barely able to control. He also steamrolls Lewis and takes it upon himself to organize auditions, casting every role, and dictating staging options. Despite this rather contentious start, the auditions do produce a cast of sorts, and Roy is so wildly excited by the prospect of the performance that his excitement becomes infectious; soon, the entire cast is gung-ho about the opera and barreling head first into their performance. The only person involved who is not infected by Roy's enthusiasm is Lewis the person who is actually officially supposed to be directing the opera.The cast are a varied group; two, Julie and Henry, are drug addicts although only Henry is actually finding a way to use them whilst in the hospital.
Julie is a confident woman whilst in hospital but as soon as she sets foot outside the doors cannot cope with life without drugs. Ruth has obsessive compulsive disorder and Cherry, who is generally not given to obsessions is newly obsessed with Lewis, and as a food addict, expanding by the minute as her crush is unrequited. The peculiar smell in the theater of old burned leaves is suddenly explained when Lewis meets Doug, who is a pyromaniac, but who never has to take responsibility for the fires that he sets because Cherry owns up to starting them even when she didn't.
Lewis provides a bridge between the two worlds of sanity and madness and the more that the play progresses the more obvious it becomes that the line between the two is very tenuous; in fact, by the end of the play it is difficult for the audience to remember which of the cast are patients inside looking out, and who are the outsiders looking in. In the course of directing the play, Lewis starts to change, and he starts to see Lucy and his friends in a different light as well.
