SOURCE: McCue, Jim. “Will Somebody Please Tell Him?” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4763 (15 July 1994): 21.

In the following review of A Whore's Profession, McCue summarizes several key points of the collection and then pans The Cryptogram for what he judges to be wandering, fragmentary dialogue.

David Mamet is forthright with opinions, so it is fair to use his collected “Notes and essays” as a bundle of sticks with which to beat his new play at the Ambassadors Theatre. A Whore's Profession, recently published by Faber, includes many prescriptions for drama on the stage and in film, emphasizing always advancement of the action. But any action in The Cryptogram is merely latent in its piecemeal, three-way conversation and some unresolved but imposing symbolism about a knife, a torn blanket and “issues of sleep.”

Mamet's ideas about storytelling revolve around the protagonist's overriding objective. In this case, we are told—by a...