["Poor Murderer"] is highly accessible in its wit, in its unflagging energy, and in its nimble, crisscrossing cat's cradle of a plot, which throws off pleasing little surprises from first line to last. There are moments when it will put you in mind of Peter Weiss's "Marat/Sade," or of Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," or possibly of one or another of Pirandello's darkly prankish pirouettes through time, but far from disowning these distinguished ancestors, "Poor Murderer" pays open tribute to them; [Pavel Kohout] also acknowledges his debt to Shakespeare, whose "Hamlet" forms portions of a play within the play, and to a short story by Leonid Andreyev called "Thought." For the thousandth time and with the usual delight, we observe how the artist, out of a past laboriously mastered, fashions with seeming ease something indisputably new. (p. 99)

Brendan Gill, in The New Yorker (© 1976 by The...