That is open to debate, but Lendl's stern, statue-like presence at courtside does seem to have given Murray pause for thought, even if he exploded a couple of times at Queen's last week on the way to winning a record fifth title – against McEnroe's new pupil, Milos Raonic.
But when he was asked if he would retire now, he exploded.
But then, he divined the threshold: "If he ate so much he exploded".
At one point in the second set, Murray won nine of 13 points and Kyrgios looked as if he might explode.
It all culminates in one truly suspenseful moment: at the end, when Sganarelle has been proved wrong, one sincerely wonders if he will explode all over the first few rows.
"He was heading into a place where, if he had exploded all the ordnance he had with him - and that was quite substantial - … it would have been mass casualties of a sort we haven't seen in Europe for quite some time.
And partly it's because during Mr. Waterston's long, raspy rant in the second act, when he falsely thinks his daughter is a tramp, the main distraction is not that he's talking about his real-life daughter; it's that it looks as if he might explode or spontaneously combust at any moment in the summer heat (3:00).
Faki was in a more maximal mode, playing harder and faster than his power station pal, and his following felt a bit more feral, a bit more oh-shit-this-could-literally-explode-if-he-picks-a-hard-enough-record.
My mother, Tilda, used to say that it was as if he needed to explode every day, and once he did, he was fine.
