Lucky Dog (play)

Michael Billington in The Guardian praised the play, claiming to be "astonished by the 28-year-old Butler's profound understanding of marital solitude" and that "there are many noisier plays around but few capture so well the marital stated summed up by Beckett as “alone together, so much shared.”[5] Adam Scott of The Independent described the play as a "provoking hinterland of unspoken trauma" and that "as you reassemble the fragments of the evening, Butler reveals himself as a writer of prescience and subtlety".[6] While Kate Bassett of The Independent on Sunday reviewed the play as a "darkly funny and remarkably poignant portrait of a marriage. Butler's dialogue combines naturalistic chat, a musical sense of phrase and pause, and surreal episodes. The last act is an extraordinary coup de theatre, imbued with an almost heavenly sense of new-found tenderness and atonement.[7]

Fiona Mountford of the Evening Standard called the play a "searing yet achingly poignant examination of family life turned sour" in which "the silences, laden with frustration and tension" are "just as powerful as the spoken word".[8] However, Dominic Cavendish of the Daily Telegraph felt that "it's as if Butler were trying to pack the longest, dreariest Christmas anyone could possibly experience into 90 minutes."[9] Sarah Hemming of the Financial Times argued that "in a play so poignantly focused on loss and neglect, the unsaid, the unseen and the offstage play a huge part. You keep expecting something violent to happen, but it doesn’t as Butler’s portrayal of domestic horror is subtler than that. He shows us how cruel the simple withdrawal of love can be."[8]