Mr Simpson has revealed in a newspaper interview that he was not aware of Ionesco when he wrote [A Resounding Tinkle]. If one did not know this, one would say that it is an application of the Ionesco shock technique to English suburbia. The absurd is being consistently used to explode the dreariness of the conventional world. The elephant [in the play represents], I suppose, love of animals carried to the extreme and also the animal part of human nature, which has been evacuated, leaving only a dried husk. The reading of poems, instead of having a drink, is a way of emphasizing by inversion the weakness of contemporary language. The wireless service is nonsense because these people live according to dead forms that they long ago ceased to understand. The wireless reflects their speech to show that they are not individuals but anonymous types. They don't really...