The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Sep. 29, 1952

Mr. Pickwick (freely adapted from Charles Dickens by Stanley Young) transfers The Pickwick Papers very pleasantly to the stage. What results, to be sure, is no longer exactly The Pickwick Papers: in writing for the theater, Playwright Young has been forced to domesticate one of the most gallivanting and helter-skelter of narratives, and hence to sacrifice a good deal of its hearty coaching flavor and its wildly exuberant fun. Moreover, in the act of boiling down the contents of the book, he has scrambled them as well. But if this is a thinner-blooded Pickwick, it is also a more tractable one: genius and tedium might be said to have, exited from it arm in arm.

Shown courting Rachel Wardle as well as being haled to court in the Widow Bardell’s breach-of-promise suit, Mr. Pickwick (George Howe) counts for much more on the stage than he does in the book. This means—and it is the measure of where Dickens suffers most—that Mr. Pickwick counts for much more than his gloriously Dickensian servant, Sam Weller. The trial scene, too, though it is made the climax of the evening, has been shorn of its full comic grandeur, with Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz’s appearance in it all too brief. But Stiggins, the red-nosed parson, and Jingle and Mrs. Leo Hunter and many others have a proper share in the fun, and Mr. Young has contrived a sort of affectionate final roundup in the Fleet Prison. There is an attractive cast, and John Burrell’s direction is neither too muscular nor too quaint. However debatable a change in terms of the book, Mr. Pickwick constitutes a rather refreshing change in terms of Broadway.