Pavel Kohout's Poor Murderer makes me doubly sorry for its author. Bad enough to be physically restrained in Czechoslovakia by refusal of a travel visa; how much worse to be intellectually sequestered from what goes on in the free world, so that you write as if Pirandello, Giraudoux and Anouilh were the reigning dramatists and concoct a pale pastiche of their manner.

The play (based on a story by the now passé Leonid Andreyev) concerns Kerzhentsev, an actor confined to a mental institution in turn-of-the-century St. Petersburg….

We next are meant to wonder whether he is really mad, or merely, like Hamlet, feigning madness, but—since he is a garrulous, self-important dullard—it is unfortunately rather hard to care. As for the romantic triangle underlying the tale, it is so limply passionless as to make it sublimely unimportant who ends up with whom. Of course, it is also...