So many of the productions currently to be seen on the London stage are concerned with the more violent aspects of life that it is surprising to meet a play about ordinary people caught up in ordinary events. Thomas Sackville’s the Visitor is just such a play—at least, on the surface. It seems to stand well outside the mainstream of recent British drama. In fact the surface is so bland that attention is constantly focused on the care with which the play has been put together, and the clarity with which its argument develops; it seems natural to discuss it in terms of the notion of "the well-wrought play". The story is about an unremarkable family evening in middle-class suburbia. The husband and wife have invited a friend to dinner. The friend turns up in due course and they talk about their respective lives and interests. During this conversation, in which the author shows a remarkable talent for writing dialogue which is entertaining and witty without being so sparkling as to draw too much attention to itself; the characters are carefully fleshed out and provided with a set of credible—if unremarkable—motives. Through innumerable delicate touches in the writing they emerge: pleasant, humorous, ordinary, and ineffectual. And if they are never made vibrantly alive in terms of the real world, one feels that this is deliberate; that the author is content to give them a theatrical existence of their own, and leave it at that. In fact the surface is so bland that attention is constantly focused on the care with which the play has been put together, and the clarity with which its argument develops; it seems natural to discuss it in terms of the notion of "the well-wrought play".