[Slag shows Hare] to be a prodigy. Slag is unfocussed and sometimes boring, but it is attractively articulate and theatrically at home….

The best aspect of the play is that Hare has taken a conventional comedy about a public-school staff and converted it internally into a macabre fantasy without much altering externals, rather in the manner of I. Compton-Burnett. Some of the materials are: a kind of mod Princess Ida, a female sanctum with males excluded and the results thereof; satire on cultural glibness; and, the seeming sine qua non of English playwrights these days, a microcosm of the fate of the Empire. None of these efforts wholly succeeds, largely because Hare never clarifies his viewpoint, he just has fun; but if Slag doesn't always hold interest, it always commands respect. One thing the play is bursting with is promise.

Stanley Kauffmann, in a review of "Slag" (copyright...