On the strength of his double bill, A Resounding Tinkle and The Hole, I am ready to burn my boats and pronounce N. F. Simpson the most gifted comic writer the English stage has discovered since the war…. [In my review of A Resounding Tinkle (see excerpt above)] I tried to explain how and why it had convulsed me, this casual surrealist sketch of a suburban couple with an elephant at their front door. (p. 210)

But I wondered at the time how Mr. Simpson would follow his tour de force. Could he bring it off again without repeating himself? The Hole proved triumphantly that he could; that he was no mere flash in the pen, but a true lord of language, capable of using words with the sublime, outrageous authority of Humpty Dumpty.

People who believe with John Lehmann that English writers have lost interest in verbal and stylistic experiment should see Mr. Simpson's work and recant. Indeed, everyone should see it: for it is not a private highbrow joke, but pure farce, wild and liberated, on a level accessible to anyone who has ever enjoyed the radio Goons (Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, especially) or treasured the memory of W. C. Fields. I suspect, in fact, that Goon-lovers, who are accustomed to verbal fire-work displays at which logic is burnt in effigy, may get more sheer pleasure out of Mr. Simpson than professional intellectuals, against whose habit of worrying about the meaning of things the play is essentially directed. At heart it is a riotous satire at the expense of people who deal in pigeonholes, categories, and generalisations, seeking to pin down to a consistent pattern the unrepeatable variety of human existence, working out comprehensive philosophic and religious systems in which somehow one vital thing gets forgotten: the glorious uniqueness of everything that is.

A tramp, who describes himself as "the nucleus of a queue," is peering into a hole in the road. Others join him, among them a rabid authoritarian, a drifting rubberneck, and a student philosopher: each has a fantastic vision of what is going on down the hole and tries to impose it on the others. They are interrupted, from time to time, by two housewives, one with a husband who desperately wants to be the same as everyone else ("There's nothing Sid wouldn't do to be identical with somebody"), the other with a husband who wants, equally desperately, to be different…. But here I must stop, for I am falling into the very trap Mr. Simpson has laid for us intellectuals. I am explaining instead of experiencing. And I am in danger of letting you forget that Mr. Simpson is ceaselessly, mortally, and unpredictably funny. With Michelet, he cries: "Mon moi! Ils m'arrachent mon moi!"—and if that is bourgeois individualism, long may it thrive. (p. 211)