CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THE THEATRE
"I Remember Mama." By John van Druten. (Aldwych.) Tins adroit little play about a Norwegian family in San Francisco may have moved Americans to fellow-feeling ; many in the audiences over there must have seen their own immigration mirrored in the Hanson family. Or was the remarkable Broadway success due to the cunningly woven atmosphere of synthetic home- spun, with its suggestion, sure to go down well with sophisticates, that the things that really matter in life are enshrined in humble homes and humble folk who worry about the health of the family cat ? Doubtless it was hoped to avoid our customary difficulty of British accents in American comedy by the Norwegian background ; but the players obviously hail from elsewhere in Europe than Norway, and unfamiliar, national idiosyncrasies that may be borne with at one remove become over-obscure at two. Perhaps for us Mr. van Druten should have put the whole thing into some more familiar idiom, say the Welsh. As it was, I found the wishy-washy sentimentalising tedious, and the pace of events was almost at odds with mourning.
To be fair, the piece never does less than it sets out to do, and its pleasantest moments are when our obvious hopes are gratified ; when the child's operation succeeds ; when the redoubtable Uncle Chris rounds on the unpopular aunties ; and when, later, his will shows him to have been a philanthropist in disguise. There was the fashionable type of setting that makes the curtain into a cheese-cutter across a house and a street, and Mr. van Druten makes expert use of a cinematic technique of flashback and short scenes.
Miss Mady Christians nobly sustains Mama, and amongst other good performances were Misses Kann and Frank, as the horrid aunties, wearing the most extraordinary looks, Old or New, ever seen ; kiss Helen Backlin as the story-telling daughterand, espe- cially good, Miss Adrienne Gessner. Of the casting of dr. Frederick Valk for the character comedy part of Uncle Chris I will say only that you might as well throw a camouflage net over Etna and pretend
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