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….

Gleams of some kind of truth flash back and forth across the stage somewhere between the words that are spoken and the glances that are evaded. Tea goes on being served, flowers go on being transplanted, the conversation grows brighter and brighter. Spurts of wild humor cascade without warning over the darkening landscape; epigrams that would do credit to Ivy Compton-Burnett leap unpredictably out of sober, even savage...