Patrick Hamilton’s Gaslight premiered in 1938, and actually spawned the term ‘gaslighting’, meaning to mentally torture someone by convincing them they can’t trust their own perceptions.  And with that, we have our first spoiler, because that is basically the plot of the show. 

Gaslight is set in the (beautifully recreated!) Victorian living room of Mr and Mrs Manningham.  Mrs Manningham (Meredith Dooley) is frail, pale, and beset by doubts of her own sanity: in her care, items disappear, bills go missing, and the house’s gas lamps dim mysteriously. 

Her husband, Mr Manningham, played with menace and relish by Martin Tidy, encourages Mrs Manningham’s doubts to convince her she’s gone mad – possibly to keep her from peering too closely into the mystery of the locked fourth floor.  He humiliates her in front of the servants (Joan Foster and the delightfully sassy Harriet Dawson), and seems to delight in foiling her scattered attempts at asserting herself.  By the end of Act I, Mrs Manningham is a nervous wreck, all but fainting on the couch in her nervous excitement. 

Enter Inspector Rough, who has the job of both detective and therapist. He reveals the house’s history – missing jewels and an as-yet unsolved murder (gasp!) – and tries to enlist her help in capturing the perpetrator … But is Mrs Manningham strong (and sane) enough to stand up to her conniving man? 

In her director’s note, Annabel Hensley says, “Gaslight can be seen as a costume drama thriller or as an exploration of the dark and dramatic psychoanalysis of the human mind.”  And this production suffers from that split focus.  The show comes off as part psychological thriller and part Victorian-esque ‘whodunnit’, which seems a misread of the script to me.  ‘Who did it’ is never in doubt – at least not from the beginning of Act II. 

Narrowing the focus, especially in Act I, to a psychological melodrama with the fundamental conflict between Mr Manningham’s need to hide his misdeeds and Mrs Manningham’s need to be sane could go a long way to creating early audience engagement.  Instead, the production slides around for nearly 40 minutes (of its two-and-a-half-hour run time) before finding its feet. 

The formality of the period feels forced and often prevents the actors from creating actions that really impact on one another.  In particular Malcolm Gillett, as Inspector Rough, seems to struggle with this.  Gillett plays Rough as a sort of avuncular uncle figure – a welcome change from the potentially overwhelming oppression of the psychological terror campaign.  However, his attempts to alternately comfort and joke with Mrs Manningham feel stilted as he maintains a respectful ‘Victorian’ distance, and I often wish he would just reach out and take her hand – or at least make eye contact. 

On the other side, chances to reinforce concerns of the period are often ignored, such as when the men in the play throw their coats and hats on the chair instead of handing them to a servant, which would reinforce the class structure and give some under-utilized actors more to do onstage. 

On the technical side, for a play that has ‘light’ in the title, Aaron Blackledge’s lighting design is fairly flat.  Nearly the whole show is lit with a strictly utilitarian front wash with some side lights to fill.  As a psychological thriller/melodrama, it seems to me that there are so many opportunities for the lights to reflect the reality inside Mrs Manningham’s uncertain mind.  Or the lights could help with period; create a sense of isolated pools of light in the London fog’s dense and impenetrable darkness. 

In addition, the lighting levels are a plot point: when a gas lamp is turned on elsewhere in the house, the pressure in the whole system is reduced, causing all the lights to dim.  Mr Manningham uses these changes as part of his relentless campaign against his wife, so it is appropriate that events offstage change the levels.  The cueing of these changes, however, is downright confusing.  While the lights dim suddenly in response to actions set up in other parts of the house, they tend to slowly sneak back up to full over the next few minutes, and I have no idea what that is meant to signify.

There are some real moments of power and interest in this performance, such as in Act III, when Mrs Manningham realises she is in the room with an evil and manipulative sociopath and has to somehow extract herself from danger without tipping him off.  Dooley’s seemingly frozen panic and retreats into ‘feminine’ weakness contrast strongly with Tidy’s glowering threats. 

As a piece of theatre history presented with fidelity, Gaslight has some interest: when was the last time you saw a three-act play with two intermission breaks and total dedication to period realism?  For me, though, I found my enjoyment hampered by the weak set-up in Act I and direction of the period style that prevents the actors from committing to relationships and actions.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer