Some critics saw political resonances in the play along with allusions to real-world events. "The Herald"'s Carole Woddis wrote that "Ridley’s upsetting portrayal is, I believe, an honourable response to the genocides in Rwanda and atrocities in Iraq". John Peter declared that "Philip Ridley has written the ultimate &lt;a href="9/11"&gt;9/11&lt;/a&gt; play: a play for the age of Bush and Bin Laden, of Donald Rumsfeld and Charles Clarke; a play for our time, when a sense of terror is both nameless and precise." However, Paul Taylor found that "the political context is too conveniently hazy", and John Gross wrote that "any political arguments are lost amid the sadistic fantasies, kinky rituals, gruesome anecdotes and flights of science fiction", with similar comments coming from Brian Logan: "whatever questions playwright Philip Ridley seeks to pose are drowned out by the shrieking and bloodshed".