One's heart starts sinking from the first moment of Michael Frayn's play [The Sandboy] when Eleanor Bron drops an armload of cushions to stare at us aghast and go into her embarrassed hostess routine. It is one of those: the audience as uninvited guests. And not only that. We are also supposed to compose a huge television crew who have gate-crashed the house to film a day in the life of her celebrity husband.

I can think of no playwright who has pulled off this particular trick which produces a continuous collision of idioms when applied to naturalistic action. And the fact that Mr Frayn should have lumbered himself with a notoriously unworkable structure amounts also to an internal criticism of the play's content. His theme is the gap between what intellectuals say and how they live: the intellectual in this case being Phil, a city planner, happy...