Cagey, isn’t he? Often dubbed as cold, clever and manipulative as his characters, LaBute is near impossible to lock down on a personal level. It’s ‘Your’ Friends & Neighbors, remember. Not Our, not My.

An academic Anglophile, a convert to practising Mormonism (“I need more practise, apparently”) and Mametism, LaBute never answers to or apologises for his characters.

Even more confusingly, this vicious social dissector – whose stage-plays tackle incest, infanticide and 9/11 – initially wanted to pen sketches for Saturday Night Live. He’s happily married to his psychotherapist wife, with whom he has two children.

He learned the rules of the Gender War sat in the backseat of his parents’ car, listening to them argue. “My father was a professional truck driver,” he once said. “And a part-time son of a bitch. I’ve tried to do as much as possible to distance myself from him.”

On the flip-side, then, this is LaBute doing it for the girls – practically a revenge-pic inversion of In The Company Of Men.