Afterlife, the new play by Michael Frayn, is not a success. A meditation on the life of Max Reinhardt, the great Jewish impresario, it incorporates dozens of scenes from Everyman, a medieval morality play that Reinhardt staged at the Salzburg Festivalin 1920. This continual switching back and forth makes for an unsatisfactory experience. Just as you’re beginning to get interested in Reinhardt’s fete, another gobbet from Everyman pops up -- and it doesn’t help that the play-within-the-play is written in verse. By the end, you’ve begun to dread these interludes and you long to see a version of Afterlife that is unencumbered by Everyman.

The play is so obviously a failure -- it has been panned by most of the critics-- you begin to wonder how it ever got to this point. Couldn’t Nicholas Hytner, the artistic director of the National, have said something when Frayn delivered the script? And what about Michael Blakemore, Frayn’s long-term collaborator? He has made a decent fist of directing Afterlife, but you would have thought that someone as shrewd and experienced as him would have taken Frayn to one side and told him to go back to the drawing board.

One possibility is that Frayn’s previous two plays -- Copenhagen and Democracy -- have been so successful that no one dares question his judgment. If Everyman was the work of an A-list film director, that would surely be the explanation. But the theatre isn’t like the movie business. There are plenty of egomaniacs around, to be sure, but they tend to be the producers, not the writers. No playwright is so successful that his collaborators would be too intimidated to speak their minds.

I suspect that the reason Afterlife was allowed to reach the stage in its current state is because it is notoriously difficult to tell whether a play is going to work until it has been unveiled before the public. William Goldman famously coined the phrase “No one knows anything” to describe the filmmaking process -- and that goes double for the theatre. It explains why so many turkeys open each year in the West End, from Oscar Wilde: the Musical to Lord of the Rings. Even if a play initially fails to attract an audience, that is no guarantee it won’t subsequently be acclaimed as a classic, the best known example being The Birthday Party. Indeed, it is entirely possible that Afterlife may come to be regarded as one of the best plays of the 21st Century. Perhaps that is why Frayn called it “Afterlife”.

Even if the play vanishes without a trace, it is easy to forgive Frayn. After all, a strike rate of two out of three is not bad. In the theatre, unless writers are allowed to risk failure, they’re unlikely to produce anything worthwhile.