['Benefactors'] is a seriously amusing four-hander which takes Frayn away from the richer emotional resourcefulness of (in my opinion) his best play to date, 'Make and Break,' and into the patterning of couples more familiar in Ayckbournland. It is, for him, an excessively neat, neoclassical sort of piece which draws on only a fraction of his imaginative range, and in which the four characters … speak both to one another and to the audience.

It is coloured throughout by the imagery of planning, destruction, rehabilitation and twilight zones as applied to areas of Victorian suburbia and the human refuse of liberal revolution alike, but Frayn seems to be both mocking the methods of Ibsen … and making use of them. Something quite delicate is being said about men, women and change—men believing they effect it, women knowing they cannot—but the real problem with the play is simply...