I have to admit to a degree of trepidation approaching this update of Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 psychological thriller Gaslight, whose title has become shorthand for psychological manipulation so extreme the victim begins to doubt their own sanity.
I was concerned that Canadian playwrights Johanna Wright and Patty Jamieson would so crudely modernise the play and amplify and underline its relevance that it would become a post-Me Too lecture, as is routinely done on the big screen and in television series.
Gaslight stars Toby Schmitz and Geraldine Hakewill.
My foreboding proved totally unfounded as Wright and Jamieson have masterfully stripped down and freshened up Hamilton’s play (as well as borrowing from George Cukor’s better-known 1944 movie version starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman) at the same time as maintaining its period integrity.
Indeed, I found myself marvelling at how the wonderfully talented cast totally managed to fully inhabit this story of an Edwardian household replete with stuffy, sanctimonious patriarch, his emotionally fragile wife and a pair of servants watching from the edges at the same time as maintaining a slight ironic distance from the action
It made for a smart and entertaining night of commercial theatre of the kind that once dominated the West End and Broadway and is little-seen today, especially in Perth.
Set in London in 1901, Gaslight opens with the lady of the house, Bella Manningham (Maddison Burridge on the night I saw the show but Geraldine Hakewill for the regular run) slowly unravelling in the face of a series of inexplicable happenings.
Objects around the house are going missing, a painting is taken off the wall and stashed somewhere, a string of pearls left to Bella by her mother have disappeared and there are ominous noises coming from the attic that only Bella can hear. And only she notices the gaslights dimming ever so slightly (a terrific theatrical device).
Bella’s husband Jack (Toby Schmitz) is so worried that he hires a new maid, Nancy (Courtney Cavallaro), whose sassy, sarcastic attitude serves to further rattle her mistress, who fears she is going out of her mind.
So worried is Jack that he confides in the elderly housekeeper Elizabeth (Kate Fitzpatrick) that he is planning to leave the home because its dark history — a previous owner was murdered during a robbery — is sending his wife over the edge.