New Play in Manhattan

Angel Street (by Patrick Hamilton; produced by Shepard Traube in association with Alexander H. Cohen) gave Broadway its first real shudders in almost two years. Author Hamilton, who raised audiences' hackles with his Rope's End in 1929, can still summon up goosebumps. No crude spook or corpse melodrama, no bloody bundle of closet horrors, Angel Street, which played in London under the title Gaslight, has the good old English knack of brewing a thriller in a teacup, of making a Victorian parlor more menacing than an opium den, of giving to gaitered footsteps a carpet-slippery stealth. This spooky tale of London's gaslit era creates suspense, not by keeping the audience in ignorance, but by making it doubt what it knows. It builds up tension, not by hurrying its pace, but by slowing it down to a nerve-racking creep.

The play opens strong, with a seemingly patient husband slowly, systematically torturing his young wife in order to drive her insane. He harps on the fact that her mother went mad; he hides things, then dupes her into thinking that she mislaid them during mental lapses. What looks like the work of a sadist is revealed, however--after a Scotland Yard man succeeds in catching the unhappy wife alone--as the desperate maneuvering of a murderer who has long eluded the police.

The rest of the play, in the plot sense, merely consists of trying to get the goods on him, and it runs pretty thin at times. What largely keeps it going, in spite of its lightweight sleuthing, is the sharp matching of minds, the ominous atmosphere, a smash psychological finish and a first-rate cast.

Making her Broadway debut, Judith Evelyn plays the terrified wife brilliantly, knowing when to show restraint, when not to. And Vincent Price is never a mere stage villain, Leo G. Carroll never a mere stage detective.

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