Fry's plays concentrate on a group of closely related themes: the redemptive power of love, both eros and agapé; the wonder, paradoxes and unity of existence; the cycle of life, death and renewal; the operation of necessity and the nature of individuality; and man's relationship with the universe and with God. Several of his plays—The Boy with a Cart (1939), The Firstborn (1949), Thor, with Angels (1948), and A Sleep of Prisoners (1951)—are overtly religious, but the secular plays, through their distinctly religious sub-structures, also pursue, in Fry's own phrase from A Sleep of Prisoners, "an exploration into God." A few examples of such sub-structures are the ritual death and rebirth patterns in A Phoenix Too Frequent (1949) and in The Lady's Not for Burning (1949), the process of love, sacrifice and redemption in those plays and in Venus Observed (1950) and The Dark Is Light Enough (1954), and the sacramental nature of Rosmarin's human relationships in the latter.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Fry should be drawn to the near-mythical contest between Henry II and Becket over the respective demands of Church and State. Their struggle exemplifies the clash of the secular and the spiritual and, although unresolved historically except by death, invites the artist to explore its shape. Fry's exploration in Curtmantle takes the path of a dual quest. One aspect is "The progression towards a portrait of Henry, a search for his reality," which is indicated in the play by Richard Anesty's repeated question at the end of the Prologue: "Where is the King?" Structurally, this theme is explored in a series of episodes which are linked by the process of history and by the controlling consciousness of William Marshal's memory. The other half of the quest is also firmly established in the Prologue: the search for "Law, or rather the interplay of different laws: civil, canon, moral, aesthetic, and the laws of God; and how they belong and do not belong to each other."… This second quest is inextricably allied with the artist's desire to find form: just as Henry's energy "was giving form to England's chaos" …, so Fry is attempting to structure action, character and language in a form that will express the "permanent condition of man" and will yield meaning for the modern audience from the barren facts of history.
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