As a popular commercial dramatist for home consumption [Anderson] is fine, but of precisely the sort that does not travel. In [I Never Sang for My Father] one is conscious all the time of the adroitness with which he is pressing the right buttons for an American audience, from the things the Americans around one laugh at, the things they listen to in apparently moved silence. But, kept apart by a common language or not, most British playgoers are likely to find that the buttons do not produce the right effect, or indeed often any effect at all. (p. 43)

As you may perhaps have gathered, this is another of those plays, with which the American theatre is strewn, about an agonised father-son relationship. (pp. 43, 78)

Clearly the situation is not, in human terms, inconceivable. But the hero's endless devotion to the idea of winning his father's love is so...