Mr Simpson has revealed in a newspaper interview that he was not aware of Ionesco when he wrote [A Resounding Tinkle]. If one did not know this, one would say that it is an application of the Ionesco shock technique to English suburbia. The absurd is being consistently used to explode the dreariness of the conventional world. The elephant [in the play represents], I suppose, love of animals carried to the extreme and also the animal part of human nature, which has been evacuated, leaving only a dried husk. The reading of poems, instead of having a drink, is a way of emphasizing by inversion the weakness of contemporary language. The wireless service is nonsense because these people live according to dead forms that they long ago ceased to understand. The wireless reflects their speech to show that they are not individuals but anonymous types. They don't really live; they repeat behaviour patterns. The uncle's change of sex is accepted at once, after a little coo of wonder, as if it were a new suit, because all sorts of changes can take place nowadays and leave the surface of prosiness unruffled.

The difficulty, as with Ionesco, is to decide whether the playwright is making a general poetic statement or just standing normal situations on their heads one after the other to produce a series of local effects. I think deductions can be made from the dottiness of A Resounding Tinkle, but I am not sure that all the details fit in or that there is any great dramatic body to the work. Madness, of course, is more difficult to evaluate at first sight than sense. Sense you can grasp by an immediate effort of will, but madness has to be left in the memory to see if it will endure. The play causes a titillation of amusement and a few good laughs, but my feeling a week later is that Mr Simpson may be more calculating than deeply humorous.

The second item, The Hole, made me think of Ionesco, plus Beckett, plus a throw-back to German Expressionism. A tramp has dossed down next to a hole in the road. He says there is a cathedral at the bottom of the hole and that he is waiting to see the new west window unveiled. Three passers-by peer into the hole and see various things there—different games in progress, fish swimming in aquaria, a political prisoner languishing in his cell, etc. In the background, two Cockney charwomen keep up a dialogue about the peculiarities of their respective husbands, one of whom longs to be like everybody else while the other tries to be different. What is the hole? The unconscious or both consciousness and unconscious? The tramp is presumably waiting for the beatific vision. The three passers-by suggest the hollowness of the scientific-determinist explanation of life or the conventional religious account. The wailing women's voices perpetually define the two extremes of maladjustment. At least, that would be my interpretation, although here again all the details do not quite seem to fit in. I couldn't make out why some passages were transparently allegorical, while others were obscure. I should say that The Hole is both more ambitious than A Resounding Tinkle and less successful. The main weakness lies in the stage-business of the passers-by coming in and out and moving round the hole. It can only be carried off by turning them into stylized puppets, and so there is a constant buzz of activity to cover up the fact that the words need no action at all, but are really being intoned as by a stationary chorus. The Hole is not a play with characters; it is a vocal sextet in rhythmical prose. And, like A Resounding Tinkle, it clarifies into the most telling jokes in those parts where it is straightforwardly antireligious. The anticollective political satire seems rather second-hand and there is a trace of sentimentality in the presentation of the tramp with his 'private vision' as the one voice that might develop into a sympathetic character.

To sum up, the two pieces produce no shock of acquiescence; they only excite the brain without satisfying it, but that, of course, is exciting. (pp. 553-54)