It is not the cast's fault that this interesting, sometimes tantalising play does not quite come off. It is not their fault because they are highly accomplished professionals who give this production everything that is best about it – not least David Warner, who as the rich businessman-epicure-connoisseur Karl has a prodigious feat of memory and characterisation to perform, doing most of the speaking over the play's hundred-minute duration, and carrying all the burden of its drama by painting, dab by dab, the picture which his unexpected visitor – Philip Glenister's David – is destined to smash at the end.
    No, it is not the cast's fault that they play does not quite work. The problem is one of structure, pacing, writing. There is a long thin stretch when Karl, having invited a complete and at first unwelcome stranger to share a specially-arranged dinner of snails with him, fails to press him to explain why he is there and what he wants. This is all the more unsatisfactory because the stranger reveals too great a knowledge of Karl's house, its contents, his family and its history, for any normal human being to pass over – for his questions and his comments seem not just impertinent but uncanny, invasive, even sinister. Yet Karl scarcely complains; he bridles when David asks him about business deals, but otherwise he presses on with his emphatic views, his sexual innuendoes to Rosa, his mild persecution of Katrin – the former a temporary waitress, the latter his housekeeper – and his obsessive desire to eat his snails and drink his fine wines at exactly the moment that fellow-epicures, members of the same club who regularly dine together (even at a distance), are eating and drinking theirs in far-off Paris.
    Of course Olafsson needs time to develop Karl, to heighten the mystery of David's presence, to prepare everything for the psychological crash owed to Karl's over-assertive, over-assured, blind, selfish, pampered and relentless ego. This consummation is merited not least because of Karl's harshness to his own family – his dead wife, his gentle brother who recently committed suicide, his son who does not wish to follow him into the family firm. But it is the playwright's duty to make such time plausible, offering us believable reasons why the purpose of David's visit does not emerge until the end when it gives the play its crisis. An absence of plausibility in this crucial respect is what weakens the whole, giving it the air of mere artifice, and thereby making its audience uncomfortable.
    There is a good play struggling to find its feet in this incompletely-worked version. Olafsson has understood his characters, and there is much in the play of conversation which is striking and witty, and in the imagined scenario which is original and fresh. It does not even matter that the crisis, when it comes, has something of cliché about it. But it needs an extra layer – another character, an additional motivation – which will allow David's revelations to be credibly stalled until the end. Of such simple things is the difference made between theatre and theatricality, between good and "not quite".
AC Grayling