Angel Street

IF Angel Street alias Gaslight were not the stuff of legend, it might be the stuff of successful Loeb shows; but workmanlike and entertaining as George Hamlin's production is, it reveals little in Patrick Hamilton's 30-year-old melodrama besides the all-too-familiar story. Conceivably aware of this, director Hamlin has inserted into the prgoram a defense of the play on historical grounds, claiming that Angel Street made melodrama "respectable" through substitution of psychological motive for coincidental fate. Suspend all criticism of Hamilton's Freudian prowess, and the defense triumphs. But there is a further pitfall, an arguable one, and that is the movie Gaslight, a living rendition of the play standing tall above the Loeb's emulative reach.

To Hamlin's credit, he has not reached. His staging of Angel Street adheres to the liner notes, emphasizing Mrs. Manningham's dispersed mind and its pendulum swings back and forth between her husband, who seeks to drive her mad, and Rough, the detective who sets her free. Most interestingly, at the play's finish Mrs. Manningham's future sanity is left questionable when only a slight gratuity on the part of the director--a laugh, even a smile--would suffice to set the audience easy. It is an honest production, if a bland one, what a repertory company of poorly read but competent old pros might deliver.

MARY Moss has her hands full with the fear and derangement of Mrs. Manningham, both of which she depicts well; but her performance imparts no sense of a character lying beneath temporary insanity. Still, hers is the most accurately gauged portrayal in a set of competent ones. Martin Andrucki, her murderous husband, wears thin through lack of modulation, and a vocabulary of stock gesture. His beard will live on longer than his performance. Andre Bishop, as Rough, wears thin through camp and self-indulgence, but at least has a sure sense of where he's at. The maids, Joan Tolentino and Emily Sisson, work through their roles with a haughty assurance characteristic of certain British black-and-white movies of the 30's and 40's.

Donald Soule's set, but for brown woodwork a shade too shiny, is an eminently presentable post-Victorian product, markedly more solid than the usual Loeb interior. Alan P. Symond's lighting still casts a few unintended shadows, but should be rebalanced by tonight, at which time also the all-important gaslight might be better coordinated with Mrs. Manningham's references to it. Among the citations in the program is one to an outfit named "Bwana Bus and Lighting" whom we are presumably to thank for some incidental virtue of this pleasant, unmemorable show.