and feel sad, and really think about, as Bond himself puts it, 'the moral and political paths people could take in the situation the world was in'." Paul Levy of The Wall Street Journal (reviewing Kent's production) criticized the play as lacking coherence, but found the hymn-singing at the funeral "gloriously funny", and praised the performances of Atkins, Haig, and Marcia Warren. In a 2014 article for The Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout called the play a "masterpiece" deserving of more productions. Grant Golden of Buffalo Rising said that while The Sea is "a little less than the sum of its estimable parts", portions of it "have stuck around in my head for a good deal longer than I thought they would." He called Mrs. Rafi's final appraisal of herself "simultaneously humorous and touching". Variety's Karen Fricker had reservations about the first act but stated that the play "[achieves] the required comic-tragic-pathetic grandeur in the second-act funeral scene", the waterside setting of which provides (in the critic's opinion) "a jarring but effective tonal contrast to the scene’s arch sendup of Englishness". Fricker argued, "Bond is clearly no fan of the red pen, and the play suffers for it. But there is exhilaration in the breadth of his reference, social conscience and theatrical imagination". Jon Kaplan of Now praised the play as "thoughtful and incisive" and said that the Shaw Festival's acting ensemble "know how to mine the work's text and emotional subtext". The Globe and Mail's J. Kelly Nestruck praised Hatch as Bond's "most riveting theatrical creation". Tamara McCarthy said of The Sea, "The complex characters, the poetry of the piece, and the absolute ripping humour resonated with me for quite a while afterward.” Robert Cushman of National Post lauded Hatch and Mrs. Rafi as "major creations", referring to the latter's speech about her future self as "one of the great speeches in modern drama"; Cushman also praised the funeral scene as "brilliantly grotesque". While criticizing the play's ending as a moralistic discussion between three minor characters, he still dubbed the play a "near-masterpiece". Some critics have been less laudatory. Toronto Star's Richard Ouzounian wrote that the "writing throughout is brilliantly witty, yet savagely political", and that the "battered old rum-pot [offers] some astonishingly valid philosophical views of the universe" near the ending. But he also said, "The Sea is full of wonderful moments, but it’s not a unified wondrous