[The] most interesting quality of [Peter Shaffer's] work is its impersonality. His work has all the classic qualities of the traditional dramatist—cast-iron construction, a coherent and well-plotted story to tell, solid, realistic characterization, extreme fluency in the composition of lively, speakable, exactly placed dialogue—but ultimately he emerges in it as mysterious and impalpable as Walter, the central character of Five Finger Exercise, who, if he is the hero, must be one of the most chilly and enigmatic heroes on record. (p. 227)

[It] is unlikely that anyone would have predicted great things for him on the strength of these first two plays; the earlier, Balance of Terror, was a thriller about spies and counterspies tussling over an intercontinental ballistic missile, cunningly put together along conventional lines but nothing very out of the ordinary, and the later, The Salt Lands, was a patchily worked out though serious and well-constructed attempt to present a classical tragedy situation in terms of modern Israel.

All the more surprising, then, that his first performed stage play, Five Finger Exercise, should be so outstandingly successful on every level. For one thing, in it Shaffer invades that most dangerous of all territories for an English dramatist, the prosperous upper-middle-class drawing-room of a house in the Home Counties. Not only that, but his play is put together with the theatrical aplomb of a Pinero, well provided with dialogue of remarkable crispness and articulacy, and technically very much part of the mainstream tradition of British drama; it would have been written in much the same way (though perhaps it would not have found such ready backing) if John Osborne and the rest had never lived. (pp. 227-28)

[Five Finger Exercise] claims our attention not only for its traditional virtues, which are considerable, but because if we look at it more closely it turns out to be an unusually skilful and unexpected foray of new ideas and new perceptions into the fustiest stronghold of convention; having convinced the old-fashioned West End playgoer that it is 'all right'—not sordidly concerned with the kitchen sink, and certainly not in any way experimental, but just an ordinary play about people like you and me—it proceeds bit by bit to strip its characters and their way of life bare with as much ruthlessness as Ionesco sets about rather the same business in The Bald Prima Donna. Only here the weapon is psychological penetration: Shaffer takes the typical Dodie Smith-Esther McCracken family—fussy, scatterbrained mother, stolid, inarticulate father, bossy tomboy daughter, arty varsity-bound son—and instead of accepting them as the self-evident, indisputable données upon which a light comedy or drama can be based, he asks us to look at them, consider why they are as they are, and what would happen if suddenly something unexpected, from outside their normal experience, should intrude on the settled picture of complacent mediocrity.

The intruder in this instance is Walter, a strange, charming, mysteriously reserved young German tutor who acts as a catalyst for all sorts of violent and unexpected emotional reactions. Each member of the household sees him as a potential ally or lover: the mother dreams perhaps of a discreet affair with him or more probably of amorous proposals flatteringly pressed upon her and skilfully parried; the father finds he can talk to him in a way which is unthinkable with his own son; the level-headed daughter finds his lack of involvement disconcerting, and the son discovers in him at last the congenial companion he has been seeking (his mother in a bout of bitter fury at the end, when Walter has revealed that his feelings for her are infuriatingly filial, suggests that Clive's feelings for him are tinged with homosexuality, but there seems no real reason for us to believe her).

The originality of the observation, all the more potent for being disguised beneath an apparently conventional surface, is paralleled by the veiled originality of the form of expression used. Taken line by line there is nothing at all surprising or upsetting about Shaffer's style: it is just the usual pruned, heightened realism of traditional stage parlance. But if we look at the play as a whole it at once becomes apparent that the action does not progress, as one would expect, by way of conversations leading purposefully towards clear stages in the dramatic argument; instead, the play organizes itself into a series of splendid self-revealing tirades, usually directed at the passive, uninvolved head of Walter, who remains so mysterious (necessarily to his function in the play) precisely because he alone of the characters is not permitted to reveal himself in this way—the other characters reveal themselves to him just because he does not react sufficiently to spoil the imaginary pictures of him they are building up in their minds or step outside the role each has assigned him in his or her personal drama.

Five Finger Exercise is immensely clever, extremely well written, and completely theatrical in the best possible sense of the term; it is one of the most finished plays we have seen in the last five years. It is also quite impersonal, almost as though the author has felt it his duty to keep himself entirely out of the picture. This is not necessarily a bad thing … but it is disconcerting. (pp. 228-29)