Lawrence MacDonald praised the dynamic between Carson and Hatch, as well as the character of Evens. However, MacDonald said that the play's eight scenes "don't quite add up to a total, self cementing structure" and derided the scenes "between Willy Carson and Rose Jones. They come across as fiat and banal concessions to the boy meets girl syndrome." Ian Shuttleworth wrote for the Financial Times, "His comedy is frequently as broad as a 1970s television sitcom, and his passages of more profound comment tend to interrupt this silliness obtrusively rather than to sneak in under its Trojan-horse cover. [...] The Sea constantly declares that it has depths, but Bond never summons the resolve to trawl them properly". Colin Dabkowski of The Buffalo News wrote, "For this particularly bleak brand of existentialist drama to sit side-by-side with such finely calibrated mannerist comedy is unusual but often thrilling. [...] by placing haunting reflections on the experience of life in a dead-end seaside town in such proximity to slapstick comedy, Bond seems to be making a statement on the power of theater as an antidote to the void, or at least a distraction from it." Chicago Tribune's Sid Smith billed The Sea in 1994 as a "dense, erratic, compelling piece of theater", as well as "a feast of acting opportunity and emotional depths" that "gracefully wends back and forth between [tragedy and comedy]", but Smith criticized some of the acting in the Cypress Group performance he attended. In 1999, Ian Stuart of the University of Southern California described the play as "excellent". Mark Ravenhill called Mrs Raffi "terrifyingly hilarious [...] ruling a small seaside community with an iron fist and an acid tongue." In 2007, Neil Genzlinger of The New York Times dubbed The Sea a "funny-in-that-British-way" play. The following year, Paul Taylor said in The Independent that the play has "hilarious" and "haunting" aspects. Susannah Clapp called it "both magnificent and a mess [...] it's not an indictment of a play which is both a picture of a world on the point of destruction and a satire on the British social set-up to say that it doesn't hang together: does King Lear exactly cohere?" Charles Spencer of The Telegraph described the work as a "classic piece of English eccentricity". Molly Flatt of The Guardian criticized the incidental characters as cliches but still wrote of The Sea, "It works. It made me laugh,