One's heart starts sinking from the first moment of Michael Frayn's play [The Sandboy] when Eleanor Bron drops an armload of cushions to stare at us aghast and go into her embarrassed hostess routine. It is one of those: the audience as uninvited guests. And not only that. We are also supposed to compose a huge television crew who have gate-crashed the house to film a day in the life of her celebrity husband.

I can think of no playwright who has pulled off this particular trick which produces a continuous collision of idioms when applied to naturalistic action. And the fact that Mr Frayn should have lumbered himself with a notoriously unworkable structure amounts also to an internal criticism of the play's content. His theme is the gap between what intellectuals say and how they live: the intellectual in this case being Phil, a city planner, happy as a sandboy translating the structural philosophies of [Noam] Chomsky and [Claude] Levi-Strauss into architecture, while blind to the surrounding debris of domestic collapse. Planning for doomsday, he feels himself immortal.

Comedies on this subject tend to be written by pragmatic outsiders. The Sandboy differs from them as it is the work of an intellectual who can arm his hero with any amount of plausible chat about the vocabulary of clip-on units and the need to give human life styles the flexibility of a biological structure. What Mr Frayn has failed to do is to place such speeches in comic perspective. The impression is that he is trapped in the same bag with Phil, who might indeed have written the play himself….

There are a handful of effective passages, as where … the workman lures Phil back into playing at army drill and almost gets him to lick his boots. But even this only drives home the unappealing point that superior people ought to assert their status….

[There] is not much to laugh at in … [this] production: least of all the sight of an intelligent writer defaming his own best equipment.