Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954), Friday 7 May 1954, page 7


Vienna Play In Shaw

Translation

-*

The Metropolitan Theatre last night seemed quite unde-cided whether to play "Jitta's Atonement" as a straightfaced romantic melodrama of the Pinero complexion, or as a burlesque of the artificially soulful shockers that used to entertain the less frivolous of our grandmothers. .

As one thing or the other, or with some of the shrewd merging of both moods that persisted through the first act, the pro-

duction by John Appleton could have been consistently diverting, but in the last two acts it chopped about vigorously-and pointlessly-between soul balm

and guffaws. Some of the blame, of course, rests with Shaw who was misguided enough to "translate" the play from Trebitsch's German as a reward foi Trebitsch's German trans-lations of Shaw.

It would take a very large amount of very line music, pre-ferably by Verdi, to make the plot sound anything but fatuous. The central character is a Ger-man professor's wife. She loves another professor who feels so guilty about his disloyalty to a colleague that, on the point of death, he exhorts the woman to

give his greatest scientific book to the world, not as his work, but as her husband's. Next-ofkin on both sides are then em-broiled.

Marcia Hathaway acted stylishly in each of the two con-tradictory moods in which the play was presented, with warmth of sentiment when serious dramatics were considered de-sirable, with darting wit when it was thought necessary to make fun of the dramatics.

Phillip Colledge acted the professorial lover with paternal kindliness, and side-whiskered Kenneth Warren exploded monotonously as the farcially drawn bore of a husband. June Salter, Edith Schreiber, Ronald Quilter, and Pamela Young gave rough estimates of other roles.

-L.B._