The term “gaslighting” – psychological manipulation intended to make the victim question their sanity – has become embedded in our language. This year, accusations of gaslighting were aimed at Love Island housemates Michael and Curtis. In the Netflix series Jessica Jones, David Tennant’s character played mind-control games with his victims (intensified by the fact that he could actually control minds). Taylor Swift even declared that the US public had been gaslighted by Donald Trump’s politics.
The term derives from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gaslight, which is itself fittingly deceptive. On the surface it’s a Victorian melodrama, a real potboiler, but it is uncannily insightful and accurate in its depiction of an abusive relationship.
The play was the basis for a 1940 film directed by Thorold Dickinson and for George Cukor’s 1944 film starring Ingrid Bergman. Along with his drama Rope, Gaslight made Hamilton wealthy. In the play, Jack Manningham manipulates and undermines his wife, Bella. His temper is constantly fluctuating; he dismisses and belittles her and, by turning the lights on and off, starts to make her think she is going mad. “It’s so acute in its portrayal of psychological domestic abuse and toxic masculinity, but people can lose sight of that,” says Richard Beecham, whose production of Gaslight is at Watford Palace theatre this month.
“Patrick Hamilton the commercial playwright could never quite leave behind Hamilton the literary novelist,” says Beecham. “He was a complicated man and, reading his biography, it seems he had some understanding of some of the behaviours he’s writing about.” Hamilton’s tendency to become infatuated with unsuitable women seeped into his fiction. His obsession with Soho sex worker Lily Connolly made its way into Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. The protagonist of the Gorse trilogy is a predator, a superficially charming swindler who takes advantage of women.
The Watford production is one of several Gaslights staged this year. There have already been revivals at Perth theatre and the Mill at Sonning; a version starring Martin Shaw is touring the UK and another Gaslight is coming to the Playground theatre in London.
Beecham was inspired by Safe at Last, a Channel 4 documentary that allowed cameras behind the doors of a women’s refuge. His production has an all-female cast playing survivors of domestic abuse who are enacting Hamilton’s play as an exercise in drama therapy. To prepare, Beecham worked closely with a women’s refuge. The cast created individual backstories for the modern women they are playing and they remained in character when a care worker took them through a workshop designed for survivors of abuse. The cast are simultaneously playing the women in the refuge as well as Hamilton’s characters, so when Bella delivers an impassioned speech towards the end, it becomes “a sort of exorcism”. This approach also means that, in the context of Beecham’s production, a survivor of abuse is also taking on the role of the abuser, which makes the scene in which Jack attacks Bella more emotionally complex.
The character of the police inspector Rough, who is Bella’s rescuer, can be problematic for a director today: he is another dominating male presence. In Kai Fischer’s production for Perth theatre, a woman – Meg Fraser – was cast in the role. Beecham has merged the character with the figure of the drama therapist and has “pruned the text to remove some of the lazy sexism and the patronising attitudes”. Is there not, I ask, also an issue with a man directing a cast of women in a play about emotional control and power imbalance? It’s something they’ve discussed. Watford Palace’s artistic director Brigid Larmour stipulated that if he was to direct it there would need to be an otherwise all-female creative team.
Imy Wyatt Corner’s forthcoming production for the Playground theatre in London will stick more closely to Hamilton’s original. Her version will retain the Victorian setting and look to horror for inspiration. She wants to “push the audience to feel uneasy – even scared”. Inevitably, lighting will play a large part in this; she cites the film Midsommar as an inspiration.
Having first read the play 10 years ago, Corner was inspired to direct it because “its depiction of abusive relationships has not dated and remains alarmingly relevant”. The Crown Prosecution Service recorded 960 offences of coercive and controlling behaviour between 2017 and 2018, a three-fold increase from the previous year. Ninety-seven per cent of defendants prosecuted in these cases were male.
But Corner is concerned about the prevalence of the term in the media. It has become a buzzword, she says, “but also in some ways lost any attachment to the actual gravity of this type of abuse and the sensitivity this topic can require”. “Now is a very good time to revisit the play,” she says, and “consider what – if anything – has changed.”
