The dramatist who would convey one of the essential secrets of her play by having two of her characters sit down in the second act and simply ask one another twenty questions is quite a daring one. The dramatist who can, while engaging in this pretty game, make us all lean forward and hang suspended on every curious word must be a very good one. I say "must be" because … ["The Chalk Garden" is] baffling on quite a few counts….

It was my disturbing impression [while watching "The Chalk Garden"],… that Enid Bagnold, its author, had perhaps written the wrong play. She introduced some odd and interesting characters, provided them with a provocative situation, revealed signs of an original sense of humor and demonstrated that she is the possessor of a graceful and intelligent prose style, but it seemed to me that the resulting drama … rarely came to life in the fashion it kept hopefully suggesting…. ...

Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden … may well be the finest artificial comedy to have flowed from an English (as opposed to an Irish) pen since the death of Congreve. Miss Bagnold's style recalls Ronald Firbank's The Princess Zoubaroff; it has the same exotic insolence, the same hothouse charm. We eavesdrop on a group of thoroughbred minds expressing themselves in speech of an exquisite candour, building ornamental bridges of metaphor, tiptoeing across frail causeways of simile, and...