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 WA 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 prove commercial'. It did: the play ran for nine months, then transferred to Broadway, where there were nine curtain calls on press night".