Theatre reopens in Adelaide as stage breaks the Covid drought
This murder mystery gave its name to a nasty form of psychological violence and will be staged in Adelaide.
The play that will bring the lights up on our COVID-benighted theatres is not a sparkling comedy, or a classic Shakespeare or Chekhov, but a slightly creaky drawing-room drama that gave its name to a form of psychological manipulation.
Gaslight is the 1938 play by British playwright Patrick Hamilton that enjoyed considerable success in its day, being produced on Broadway with the title Angel Street, and made into several film and TV versions. The best known is the 1944 Hollywood movie with Ingrid Bergman and it also was filmed by the ABC in 1958 with Beverley Dunn as Bella Manningham, the wife who is bullied and belittled by her abusive husband.
Mitchell Butel, of State Theatre Company of South Australia, made Gaslight part of what was to be his first season as artistic director of the company. Most of his plans went out the window when the lockdown closed theatres in March. But now, thanks to South Australia’s handling of the pandemic, theatres are able to reopen and Gaslight is the play that will essentially relaunch the habit of theatregoing after a six-month hiatus.
There’s the added excitement, too, of Gaslight inaugurating the newly refurbished Her Majesty’s Theatre after a $66m facelift. Gaslight was to have been staged in the Dunstan Playhouse, but has been moved to the much larger Her Majesty’s to allow for social distancing. Patrons will sit in a “checkerboard” formation that leaves ample room between them.
Perhaps not surprisingly in the circumstances, Gaslight is meeting a pent-up demand among theatregoers and ticket sales have been brisk.
“There’s been a huge appetite for people to get back into it,” Butel says. “We could be the first large-scale production to open since COVID, and we’re opening the glorious reinvention of this classic theatre. It’s a bizarre meeting of circumstances which are good for the show, good for the company and good for the town.”
Hamilton, writing before the outbreak of World War II, no doubt had hopes for his play’s success but possibly did not anticipate the currency its title Gaslight — or rather gaslighting — would have in the era of #MeToo and fake news.
In the play, Mr Manningham (Nathan O’Keefe) uses a barrage of sneaky tricks, lies and deceptions to cover his criminal tracks and to push his fragile wife (Ksenja Logos) to the brink of breakdown. The brightening and dimming of gas lights in the couple’s gloomy house — Hamilton’s stage directions describe an air of “poverty, wretchedness and age” — is one of the mysterious occurrences that cause Mrs Manningham to think she’s losing the plot.
Psychologists have borrowed the term gaslighting to describe similar forms of manipulation involving deception and the undermining of a victim’s confidence, particularly in domestic violence situations.
“The whole notion of gaslighting is making someone question their actions or their thoughts, to make them think they’re going crazy or mad,” says Catherine Fitzgerald, who is directing the Adelaide production of the play.
“The husband, Mr Manningham, is hiding things from his wife, and then accusing her of losing them, and taking punitive action… After he goes out at night, the gas light in the room dims, and just before he comes back it goes up again. So she thinks there is someone in the house on the top floor and of course he says, ‘You’re crazy’.”
As gaslighting came into popular use it gathered a multitude of other sins. The women who stood up to convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein accused him of attempting to gaslight society when he claimed to have long championed women filmmakers and stories. In other contexts, gaslighting describes the undermining of political opponents and a form of propaganda involving the mass deception of people.
Fitzgerald, a former artistic director of women’s theatre company Vitalstatistix and of Adelaide’s queer arts festival Feast, says she is less interested in the exploring the modern practice of gaslighting than in making a really great night at the theatre. And she intends having some fun with Hamilton’s melodrama and its quaintly old-fashioned roles. She describes her version of the play as a “friller”, or a thriller dressed in frilly frocks.
“It’s set in the 1890s, and the role of women in society was very different from what it is now,” she says. “For a modern-day audience, one of the challenges may be, ‘Why is (Mrs Manningham) accepting his behaviour, and why is she so reliant on him?’ That’s what gives the play this heightened look at power relationships between genders and class. Patrick Hamilton, by 1945, was a staunch Marxist and he hated capitalism... It’s one of the things that attracts me to this play: it’s not just about men and women’s relationships, it’s also an astute study of class.”
Fitzgerald is careful not to spoil the surprise of how she will handle, in the theatre, a 2020 reading of the play. But she hints at some of her interventions. One invokes the history of Her Majesty’s as a former vaudeville theatre on the Tivoli circuit. Another involves the character of Inspector Rough, the retired detective who makes a call on Mrs Manningham. “There will be some surprises,” she says. “It’s throwing in some nuances for a modern-day audience, and also adding some more fun to the play.”
At the time of writing, Fitzgerald had just started rehearsals at the State Theatre Company’s headquarters at Wigg & Son, a former stationery factory in Adelaide. Just as theatre patrons will be socially distant in their seating arrangement at Her Majesty’s, rehearsals also have proceeded in COVID-safe fashion. It’s been a regimen of deep cleaning, hand sanitiser and contact tracing. Social distancing on set, so far, has not been a problem. In keeping with the play’s period setting, the female characters are wearing dresses with bustles, which help keep everyone at a remove.
A potential difficulty is a scene in which Mr Manningham grabs one of the servant girls and violently kisses her.
“It’s pretty obvious we won’t be able to do that,” Fitzgerald says. “So we’ll look for the function of that moment in the play, and find an alternative without changing the intention of the scene — to get the intimacy, but also the power struggle. The set has a lot of dark shadows, so we might be able to use that as a foil.”
Hamilton’s script contains detailed lighting cues. In the play’s oppressive, domestic setting, it’s the brightening and fading of gas lights that cause Mrs Manningham to think she is going mad — and expose her husband’s gaslighting.
Fitzgerald is happy if theatregoers want to discuss the psychological implications of gaslighting on their way home; in the theatre, she just wants them to enjoy themselves.
“The play is a thriller, a fun piece of theatre,” she says. “We don’t want to lose sight of the fact that this is an entertainment that happens to speak to the zeitgeist.”
Gaslight is at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide, September 4-19.
