Max Stafford-Clark has written that with the Barbican production of The War Plays, Bond "reduced a talented cast into a stumbling and incoherent shambles of walking wounded.

[3] Author Michael Mangan commented that the 1995 Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe performance was quite successful, however, and that in France the work "was described as the most important play written since the Second World War.

"[6] In a 2018 thesis, Chien-Cheng Chen listed the trilogy as a highlight among the contemporary British dramas he had read, and lauded "its versatile use of dramatic forms and its profound exploration of modern human conditions.

"[7] In The Performance of Power (1991), Reinelt compared the trilogy favorably with other works of contemporary British theatre that contain utopian elements, saying that "the combination of socialist and feminist issues raised in [...] The War Plays best approaches the imaginative task of conceiving and embodying an alternative reality.

[9] In a 2010 thesis, Frank A. Torma criticized “Bond’s attempt in his epic works, like The War Plays and Human Cannon, to give the characters poetry to say in direct address to the audience.