The Au Pair Man was first produced to popular acclaim in Dublin, Ireland, at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1968, before a mainly Irish audience. The following year, it was produced in London but received a less enthusiastic reception. The theater critic of the Times, Michael Billington, comments that while in the context of the Dublin Festival the play might seem “a joyously irreverent attack on Britain's fading Imperial grandeur,” in Britain, “its analysis of the British malaise looks oddly insubstantial, and its satire infinitely less wounding than one had hoped.” Billington finds the story contrived:

what makes the comic allegory unconvincing is that it never seems to grow out of a plausible realistic situation: instead one feels Mr. Leonard has decided on a thesis and then looked around for a way of illustrating it.

The play fared better with critics in the United States, when it...