[1] The audience, in the words of one critic, is invited to consider: "Who are these characters with their talk of light and darkness, life and death, goodness and evil, peace and war?
Writing in The Independent, Paul Taylor said that despite his initial misgivings and prejudices—he anticipated "howling boredom"—he was won over by "a staging of impressive intensity", notably the "palpable magnetism between Pascal Greggory's tall, shaven-headed, vehemently fastidious Client and Patrice Chereau's smaller, dishevelled, professionally pleading Dealer" and the "formal stateliness and a verbal elaboration" at odds with the setting.
In The Guardian, Michael Billington said it had "a certain visceral power" in the original French but found the English-language production "like a piece of incredibly prolix underground theatre".
He thought the play used a style and rhetoric specifically French and best suited to performance in its original language, far removed from traditional British theater.
[7] Directed by Timofey Kulyabin and starring John Malkovich and Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė, this adaptation changed the regular dynamic of both roles being played by male actors.