The Raft is not often performed because of the difficulties in staging it. One of the more prominent reasons is that much of the action takes place at night in the dark on a nver. Most of the commentary is written by scholars who have generally given the play mixed reviews or qualified praise. Many have compared The Raft to the other two plays m the trilogy, with The Raft regarded as the weakest of three. For example, in a 1964 article in Black Orpheus, Anthony Astrachan writes, "The language is not so rich as in the other two plays; there are fewer metaphors, and the strengths lie in the evocation of life on the river and of Ijaw proverbs and customs rather than the virtue of the words themselves." In contrast, John Ferguson generally praises the play as different from Clark's previous work but suggests it has significant problems. In a 1968 article in Modern Drama, he writes, "though the language is good, the themes are not always relevant, and the long conversations between Ibobo and Kengide as they coast down to Burutu seems used by the author to air his views on a miscellany of subjects."

Critical opinion seems to become more positive, at least concerning certain aspects of the play, over the years. In 1975, T. O. McLoughlin wrote in English Studies in Africa that "Kengide is something of a watershed character for Clark. He stands between the sufferers in the first two plays [in the trilogy] and Ozidi in the latest play [Ozidi].. . In neither of the previous two plays do we find such resistance to death or the forces that control man's future." Two years later, Albert Olu Ashaolu in Obsidian believes, "the play provides the cumulative climax of the tragic sense of life which Clark has consistently developed from Song of a Goat through The Masquerade." In 1991, Abiola Irele wrote in the introduction to Collected Plays and Poems, 1958-1988, "From the point of view of structure and dramatic action, The Raft is certainly the most compact of Clark-Bekederemo's plays. There is a continuous flow of the action that contributes to the impression of concision already determined by the reduced world of the raft"