The play was made into a film in 1973, directed by Guy Green, starring Stacy Keach as Martin, with Judi Dench as Luther's wife Katherine, Hugh Griffith as Tetzel, Alan Badel as Cajetan and Maurice Denham as Staupitz.

A 2001 revival at the National Theatre, London, directed by Peter Gill, featured Rufus Sewell in the title role, with Richard Griffiths as Tetzel, Malcolm Sinclair as Cajetan and Timothy West as Staupitz.

He drinks too much at luncheon and his comments make clear his disappointment that his intellectually brilliant son has confined himself to a religious order.

[18] A knight, who has until this point merely announced to the audience the time and place of each scene, now has a long speech commenting on the civil disorder that has erupted in the wake of Luther's religious revolution.

[20] The Times thought the play only a partial success, giving a vivid portrait of Luther the man but not illuminating "the inner compulsions or the external events that turned him into a historical personage."

The paper also criticised the proportions of the play: "Time spent on the makings of the monk is rather badly needed when the chronicle comes to the momentous events of his life.

… The language is urgent and sinewy, packed with images that derive from bone, blood and marrow; the prose, especially in Luther's sermons, throbs with a rhetorical zeal not often heard in English historical drama since the seventeenth century, mingling gutter candour with cadences that might have come from the pulpit oratory of Donne.

[24] The New York Herald Tribune described the play as "an anguished, vigorous and stammering study … not a masterpiece, not even fully coherent, it is an exploration and it wants looking at and thinking about.

She conceded Tony Richardson's "staging, excellent lighting, and bare effective sets" were as "handsome as a picture-book," but argued that this alone, along with the "gimmick of Luther's constipation," drew audiences.

"Not one of a hundred of the people who attend this play could possibly have the slightest interest in Luther and his real problems" save for "a quick educational TV-type briefing on A Great Moment in Western History: the Reformation."

She contrasted it unfavorably with the films The Flowers of St. Francis and Diary of a Country Priest, describing them as "genuine and psychologically sophisticated.