[It would seem that in Joking Apart] beneath their outward charm and desire to help Richard and Anthea are monsters. They do not respect boundaries and without boundaries there may be prosperity but there will be moral chaos. Inexorably for all their good intentions they spread disaster around them. The author's serious exposure of their impact on others is so well covered by his comic strategies that you could sit through the whole play laughing your head off without realising that an acute moral assessment is being made. But even if we take the play at its surface value it must seem a remarkable piece of work. Do not be misled by those newspaper interviews in which Ayckbourn explains how much he dislikes the act of writing and how he steels himself to dashing off his annual play in a week or so. Here is the twenty-first work of a consummate master of the art of comedy, and one that is most ingeniously and professionally structured. (pp. 49-50)

Ayckbourn takes a twelve-year span in the lives of the couple: in four scenes he brings us at intervals of four years up to the present, when the daughter who was six in scene one is having her open-air eighteenth-birthday party using that same hard tennis court that was the setting for the children's fireworks more than a decade earlier. This sense of time passing, as different landmarks in the life of this familial group are reached, is brilliantly handled….

How much longer can Ayckbourn sustain this high level of artifice? [Somerset] Maugham wrote more than thirty plays. Ayckbourn is on his twenty-second and if he were to retire at the same age as the old master (60) he has about another twenty years to go!

Ayckbourn's career is shining proof that the well-made play is alive and well. (p. 50)