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.