Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning is a play about a man named Thomas Mendip. Thomas is a discharged soldier who wants to commit suicide but ultimately doesn't. Later on, Thomas meets with the mayor and is about to hang himself but, after much discussion, he decides not too the mayor says that he must claim the two people he killed. Soon, a woman named Jannet is accused of torturing people the mayor tells Richard to arrest the woman but he says that they don't have proof an ultimately don't arrest her. Later on, in the play Jannet is drunk and so are the other people in the room. Jannet starts to tell at Thomas when he talks over her to tell his true feelings.
When it was released, The Lady's Not for Burning received exceedingly positive reviews. Kirkus Reviews, who loved the play, wrote that "The plays of this new English playwright, soon to be produced here, are a breath of fresh air in the stifling melange of the glittering word game of his contemporaries." In a contemporary review, The Guardian also loved the play, writing that "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."
