Though you wouldn't know it from the wilder reviews, the opening of [On the Razzle] was a flatter-than-expected affair. No one seemed to be rolling in the aisles, busting their guts, or indulging in analogous acts of cachinnatory self-violence; and the questions to be asked are these. Did the presence of all those scribbling critics and professional first-nighters cause a paralysis onstage that transmitted itself back to the audience, meaning that future performances may be more relaxed and funnier? Or is there something in Stoppard's adaptation of the 19th-century Viennese playwright, Johann Nestroy, innately inhibiting to laughter? Or, as I suspect, is the truth a bit of each?

That laughter is indeed Stoppard's overriding aim is shown by the general failure to exploit the pathos inherent in the tale of the two wage-slaves who hotfoot it to the metropolitan fleshpots in hopes of acquiring memories, a 'past', to sustain them through the dreary years ahead…. [The] grocery-shop in which they moil is less trap and prison than a cute period-piece, cluttered with the sort of can and carton that would now fetch pounds at any Chelsea antique dealers….; and [neither character] exudes frustration, desperation for experience, or any emotion worth taking seriously. No, everything and everyone is there for farcical purposes only….

Stoppard and his director, Peter Wood, display a somewhat promiscuous appetite for comic incident and sub-plot. The principal strands and the main questions we should be asking—will master-grocer Zangler catch his truant employees, will he find the niece who has absconded with an unwished-for lover?—too often get submerged, forgotten. The farcical possibilities of the evening's climactic episode, in which all the parties assemble in the same eaterie, could be far more robustly exploited than they are….

[It is] hard to respond to raw comic event when your ears are turning somersaults lest they miss some pun, some spoonerism, some erotic innuendo, or some other conceit or trick in what is, even by Stoppard's standards, a verbally hyperactive script. I myself found this doubly distracting, since I regard Stoppard's wit as a precious resource, but one, like gold or oil, that must also be finite. How could he squander so many clever, non-reusable lines on what is—let's say it—an enterprise at best frivolous, at worst confused and silly? Even if future audiences prove my analysis incorrect by laughing their bladders dry, better a single new play by him than twenty oldies resuscitated by transfusions of his once and only life-blood.