Gaslight to shine as Her Majesty’s Theatre opens after $66m upgrade
A Victorian-era psychological thriller will keep audiences on the edge of their socially-distanced seats at the newly refurbished Her Majesty’s Theatre.
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Gaslighting: A form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment (Wikipedia).
It’s a term which came back into the modern vernacular last decade with the rise of the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment, and has since become virtually synonymous with the deliberately confounding political tactics employed by US President Donald Trump.
Yet the origins of the expression lie on the stage, in UK dramatist Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 thriller Gaslight, which State Theatre Company will perform at the newly reopened Her Majesty’s Theatre in Adelaide next month.
First and foremost, director Catherine Fitzgerald says the play is a captivating, Victorian-era murder mystery.
“I’m calling it a feminist thriller … a friller,” Fitzgerald laughs. “It’s a melodramatic thriller – all the issues in the play are there for the audience to unpack afterwards, but it’s a great entertainment.”
Ksenja Logos will take on the central role of Bella Manningham, whose husband employs a number of tactics – which include dimming the gas lights in their home – to make her doubt her own sanity.
“The melodramatic genre is something that we’re having a lot of fun with and we’re really enjoying,” says Logos. “It’s lovely to put that in a new theatre as well, because it’s a nod to another era.”
Fitzgerald says different people will take different things away from the play.
“Some people will be focusing on the gender politics, others on the class politics. Patrick Hamilton was an avowed Marxist – he couldn’t bear what capitalism was doing and all the poverty it was creating and the greed – so that’s also in the play. It’s about how people get what they want.
“First of all, with the #MeToo movement, social commentators and journalists picked up on that term, and then it’s also been used a lot in world politics,” Fitzgerald says.
“It was one of the most used terms, according to the Oxford Dictionary, in 2018 … so it is a play that is really relevant for our world today.
“Pick any politician, pick Scott Morrison … Scotty from marketing. Look at (John) Howard, with kids overboard. It’s been going on forever. We are always being fed ‘fake news’ or being gaslighted.”
After its 1938 English premiere, the play opened on Broadway in 1941 under the title Angel Street. Two film versions of Gaslight were also made, in the UK in 1940 and the US in 1944. TV productions of the play were also produced in the UK, the US and, in 1958, in Australia.
After the success of George Cukor’s 1944 film version of Gaslight, master director Alfred Hitchcock secured the rights to adapt Hamilton’s earlier play Rope for the big screen.
“Hitchcock realised what a great psychological thriller writer Hamilton was,” Logos says. “If anything, in this climate, people are looking for escapism and that’s what we’re trying to offer.”
Logos also says the public’s own recent experience of self-isolation – and the social distancing between seats in the theatre – should add to their sense of immersion in the play.
“Everything happens in one room – all the drama is there. I think people have had experience of that recently, where they’ve been locked down,” Logos says.
“We’re focusing on giving people a good night out in the theatre. There’s a murder mystery, there are jewels that are missing – it’s entertaining.”
Fitzgerald is keeping the original 1890s setting of the play, partly as an homage to being the first major show in Her Majesty’s Theatre after its $66 million upgrade.
“But I have played around with some of the casting which will highlight the gender politics,” Fitzgerald says.
“It’s to bring another narrative and discourse about theatre itself, and artifice and pretence. It’s also a bit of a nod to music hall, at the time that the play was set, and to the reopening of the Maj.
“I’ve always had this little idea of how to set up a new conceit to enter the play. When I saw the Maj with its beautiful red curtain, I thought ‘Yes, it’s going to work’.”
State Theatre artistic director Mitchell Butel decided to program Gaslight after performing in fellow SA company Windmill’s 2018 production of Rumpelstiltskin in London, where he spent a lot of time in the National Theatre bookshop reading plays.
“I picked Gaslight up – I must confess I’d never seen the film,” Butel says.
“Even though it’s in the style of gothic thrillers, like The Woman in Black and The Mousetrap, it’s very rich. I saw there’s a way of doing this that leans into the drama, not in a campy send-up way, but in a psychologically intense way.
“There’s been a great history with this company of reinterrogating classics and presenting them in a fresh way.
“In the context of all the #MeToo conversations and political conversations about Trump, et cetera, it has been such a massive term. That term comes from this particular play … it’s had a huge impact on our culture and our psyche.
“There’s a mansplaining detective in it who’s a goodie – but Catherine is reorientating some of the gender roles. She’s kind of placing it all in a music hall meets TEDx talk framework that provides a really good access point for a modern audience … and unlocks some of the meaning of the play in a new way.”
Gaslight, Her Majesty’s Theatre, September 4-19. Book at BASS.