Blogger Ellis Sharp delivers a pretty devastating critique of John Banville's radio play, Todtnauberg, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 last week as part of the Holocaust commemorations. I was listening to it on the laptop while engaged in the distinctly low-tech and unelevating task of doing the washing-up. But with dialogue along the lines of "His concerns echo mine – we’re both dwellers in the house of language," I think it was the first time that the process of wiping clean plates actually distracted me from listening to the radio.

In fairness to Banville, the whole “encounter between European intellectuals (one of whom got up to dodgy things during the war)” genre is not easy to pull off without sinking into portentousness. For example, I seem to remember Michael Frayn's extravagantly praised play, Copenhagen (which, admittedly, I saw only as a TV adaptation) that dealt with a mysterious wartime meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, did not entirely escape the pitfalls of lumbering exposition and furrow-browed commentary that Banville's play so spectacularly fell into.