In 2007, British playwright Alexandra Wood won the prestigious George Devine Award for Most Promising Young Playwright for her play The Eleventh Capital. Her bibliography includes almost twenty plays for theatre and radio, many of them have been nominated for various British theatre awards (Susan Smith Blackburn Award and The Patrick White Playwrights' Award). In 2006 and 2007 she was the in-house dramaturg at the Finborough Theatre, London, and in 2013 she was Playwright in Residence at the Paines Plough Theatre. She lives in London.
Merit is a mother-daughter conversation, highlighting a precarious family relationship at the time of a social crisis that has caused a lot of traumatic pain on various social micro-levels, and has significantly impacted interpersonal relationships.
After her graduation, the daughter gets a job as a personal assistant to a powerful bank manager. Her mother believes that she offered him sexual favours in return. The manager is not a sexual predator or a greedy plunderer, but the mother remains sceptical, nonetheless.  
The traumatic mother-daughter relationship is a result of precarious social circumstances. The economic crisis has had a fatal impact on family intimacy. Social security no longer exists. The younger generation is forced to constantly prove their abilities, while the older generation is deprived of the security of old age and is increasingly sinking into poverty, so that the young are forced to take over the financial care of their parents. In their dialogue, a gulf opens up between two generations robbed of a decent future. 
Theirs is not a relationship of victim and executioner, but of a young woman starting her professional life with an older woman; they share an uncertain future, characterized by the collapse of the social system. 
The production interweaves a dialogue section focusing on the mother-daughter relationship crumbling under the burden of a social crisis, while the broader social context of social deprivation and misery is presented in the original scenes by the creative team members.
The play does ask questions, but does not give answers – what are we like and how should we live, how should we behave towards each other when our relationships are contaminated by social crisis? What kind of relationships remain possible in an atmosphere poisoned by the tenets of brutal capitalism?

A toxic mother-daughter relationship is a result of a deep economic crisis that is ripping up social fabric and destroying interpersonal relationships.