It’s a gas! Laughs and gasps fill the Regal for this smart update of a classic play

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.

Of course, the title of the play gives away a good deal of the plot, which does make the first half of the show predictable and perhaps not quite as entertaining as you hoped.

However, once Gaslight catches up to the audience and the full extent of the mystery is revealed it becomes hugely entertaining, with the laughter and gasps chasing each other around the gorgeous wood-panelled set that gives a pleasing and purposeful intimacy to the normally cavernous Regal stage.

Kate Fitzpatrick in Gaslight.

Bella in this update takes a more proactive role in unravelling the mystery of her disintegrating mind and takes a stronger stand, as you might expect from a feminist update on an almost century old-play.

However, the rejiging of the storyline and injection of contemporary attitudes is done with such smarts and subtlety I doubt many in the very satisfied audience would have realised Hamilton’s play has had a makeover.

While I would have liked to have seen what the regal-looking Hakewill of Mrs Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries would have done with Bella, the performance of petite, wide-eyed stand-in Burridge certainly put a delightful comic spin on the material.

Each time the strapping Schmidt loomed over Burridge’s Bella I feared for her life, as audiences might have done watching a play or a movie around the time the story is set. The whole thing is a marvel as it teeters beautifully on the edge of parody and knowingness.

Adding to the sense of irony is the deliciously droll performance of Fitzpatrick, the housekeeper who came with the house when it was rented to Jack and Bella. She has that look of someone who knows exactly what is going on and how it is going to end, but who can’t be bothered speaking up.

By the end I was enjoying the audience enjoying the show as much as the show itself, as it is a timely reminder that a well-made traditional play can put as many bums on seats as a musical or one of the more arty offerings at the State Theatre Centre.

More commercial productions of this quality and smarts would add another dimension to our depressingly narrow theatre scene.

Gaslight is on until June 9.