"The Guardian"'s Michael Billington wrote that "Stoppard pins down perfectly the critical tendency towards lofty pronouncements [...] Stoppard also plays brilliantly on the spectator's secret desire to enter the house of illusion", praising the scene when Birdboot crosses the footlights. The critic joked, "If I weren't so scared of sounding like the pretentious Moon, I'd say Stoppard's play is a minor comic masterpiece about the theatrical process." Celia Wren of "The Washington Post" called it "a brilliant parody" with a "delectably language-drunk, hall-of-mirrors world." In 2012, Anna Lively of "The Cambridge Student" said that the work "has all the wit and originality that we expect from Tom Stoppard’s plays. [...] it subverts the familiarity of the murder mystery into a satisfyingly complex metatheatrical comedy."