Old Play in Manhattan

The Bat (by Mary Roberts Rinehart & Avery Hopwood) is 33 years old--a bearded oldster among thrillers. But though it does its hissing through false teeth and glares from a glass eye, it is still strangely animate--a good deal of a mess, but only now & then a bore.

In the era of The Bat, whodunits got elaborate trousseaux, so as to set up house-haunting in style: winding staircases, sliding panels, well-trained lightning and thunder, gashed faces, bloody hands, Japanese servants, hidden blueprints, missing banknotes; it was kill and conk, conk and kill. George Moore once snorted that in War and Peace Tolstoy tried to outdo Nature, and would wake up at night screaming: "I forgot High Mass! I forgot a yacht race!" The authors of The Bat must have similarly wailed: "We left out a tarantula! We forgot a trapdoor!"

Even so, there is never a calm moment on the stage, nor many dull ones in the audience. To be sure, The Bat does no one thing very well--it never really horrifies, or mystifies, or amuses; there is profusion rather than skill, pandemonium rather than tension. But since, even in 1920, The Bat aimed at the funnybone as well as the spine, it would perhaps be a mistake to concentrate on one or the other now. What it could use is better acting: only Lucile Watson as the imperious spinster, and Zasu Pitts at moments as the maid, are up to the roles. But The Bat is fair fun even when it doesn't connect with the ball.

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