STAGE AND SCREEN The Theatre
.Crooked Cross is a dramatic commentary upon the Nazi regime in Germany. Its purpose is not to make any generalised overstatement of the case against Hitlerism, but, by showing the effects of the revolution upon a representative German middle-class family, to point out how family life, personal happiness, and civilised values may be sacrificed to the workings of a creed in which justice is supplanted by violence, 'understanding by cruelty, 'and reason by fanaticism. The story which it tells is none the less poignant for being already 'familiar in outline. It opens with a Christmas party at the .Kluger's house in Munich at the end of the first year of Nazi rule. Lexa, the daughter, is engaged to be married to a clever young doctor, who is a German and a Catholic but has the misfortune to bear a Jewish name. He has been a friend of Lexa's brothers, but they join the party and, as racial hysteria grows more acute, try to make Lexa break off her engagement with him. They are both in essence decent creatures, degraded to the level of brutes by the ecstasy of power, and Lexa, being still fond of one of them and pitying the other, lets them imagine that they have persuaded her. But she continues to visit her lover in secret and finally, when his life is in danger, dies with him when they attempt to escape together over the frontier into Austria.
There is little sense of responsibility and less of proportion in &Lunatic criticism today. If anyone has the courage to tackle a serious theme, about which almost everyone feels deeply, and does not quite succeed, he will receive a chorus of abuse from the critics ; but take some hackneyed common- • place, about which no one ever thinks at all outside the theatre, dish it up with a professional air and with some slight variant on the usual plot, and the same critics will be unanimous in their enthusiasm. The reviewers of Miss Carson's play, no doubt hankering after the regulation comedy trafficking in the adulteries of the witless, have almost without exception concentrated on its few faults and ignored its ninny merits. Certainly no one in his senses would derik that the faults are there : it is too episodic in form, the scene on the pass, which shows Lexa and Moritz attempting to escape from Germany, is flatly unconvincing, there is at least one unnecessary character, and throughout we have to take it on trust, rather than to be convinced, that Moritz is in any way a remarkable person. But its merits are substantial. Surely everyone but the critics will give Miss ('arson sonic credit for her choice of subject, surely everyone but the critics will recognise that it is an unusual merit, when dealing with such a theme, to be able to avoid sentimentality, rhetoric and propaganda, and surely everyone but the critics will be grateful to find a dramatist who is unaffected and unpretentious, who has insight, and who can genuinely interest you in the lives of her characters.
But a play so sensitive, so unaffected and so unrhetorical as this, without any of the cheap theatrical tricks which do an actor's work for him, needs good acting to be made effective on the stage. The resources of the Westminster Theatre are presumably limited, and most of the members of the cast of Crooked Cross are unfortunately young and inexperienced. Mr. Clement McCallin speaks well and looks the part of Moritz, but at times he is much too artificial and at others much too intense ; Miss Anne Firth plays Lexa simply and sincerely, but has not quite the range of expression necessary for so difficult a part ; and Mr. Stephen Murray, who played one of her brothers, was excellent when he was given something to do, but when he was not seemed to find his presence on the stage an embarrassnient. Of the other members of the cast Mr. Cecil Trouncer, as Herr Kluger, and Miss Georgette Thierry, as his wife, were admirable, but the acting of most of the remainder did not exceed the standard to be expected in good amateur theatricals. But with all its faults, and with every imperfection of performance, Crooked Cross is much better Worth seeing than all the competently written and expertly acted popular successes holding up the traffic in
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