"Who cares about those critics when you achieve the most important, that is selling tickets!
Exactly !
That's in the end what's most important. If you are producing a play and you wanted it in London, you want it to be financially viable. If you had two or three bad critics of national newspapers of well known critics that usually destroy whatever they attend to make them look cool, but you had that play in two different cities and two different theaters, and sold out all dates and in one of them you had to add extra dates, you know the audience was going, which is the most important, that's what the producers would look after, if it is financially viable.
If it sold all tickets in previous venues, not only Chichester that was a small venue, but also in Edinburgh, with a normal size of venue, and you had to add extra dates, the numbers are good enough to think that might work, specially when it involves Mark Knopfler, that being London, I'm sure he would embark in a promotion campaign in radios and tvs to help selling tickets.