The review of opening night by Brooks Atkinson had the highest praise for the acting, while describing the playwright as precocious with "a touch of genius", but saying that the words were "sometimes soporific" and that the acting made the play.[9] The play ran on Broadway through March 1951, and received the New York Drama Critics' Circle award as Best Foreign Play of 1950–51.[10]
Looking back on the play's origins for The Guardian in 2003, Samantha Ellis began, "Now irrevocably associated with Margaret Thatcher's bad pun, Christopher Fry's verse drama about a medieval witch-hunt was a surprise hit, sparking a resurgence of poetic plays in the 1940s and 1950s". She noted that the cast of Gielgud's production later in 1949 was generally well received by theatre critics: "The Observer's Ivor Brown thought Gielgud 'happy, vigorous, enchanting', Burton 'most authentic' and Bloom 'as pretty as a May morning'. And in the Sketch, J. C. Trewin praised 'the concentrated intensity, the special flame of Pamela Brown'". But, she added, "it was the play they really took to. Fry, thought Trewin, had 'the relish of the Elizabethan word-men', while for The Daily Telegraph's W. A. Darlington, he was 'like a young Shaw, but with a poet's mind'". Ellis concluded by saying, "The Daily Mail's Cecil Wilson was one of the few dissenting voices: he thought the play a 'crazy quilt of verbiage', and wondered whether 'such fiendish cleverness [would] prove commercial'. It did: the play ran for nine months, then transferred to Broadway, where there were nine curtain calls on press night".[11]
Reviewing a 2007 revival of the play, The Guardian's theatre critic Michael Billington noted, "Fry's pun-filled, semi-Shakespearean poetry may no longer be fashionable, but it has an exuberant charity that makes it irresistible. ... Fry's imagistic abundance may belong to the late 1940s, yet this play still has the power to charm".[12] Kate Britten, considering the same production for The Stage, concluded that "the production shows that Fry's 50-year-old lyrical drama stands the test of time".[13]
