In Patrick Hamilton’s now eighty-year-old tale of deceit there’s nothing scarier than a maid walking around a cluttered Victorian living room lighting gaslights for the evening.
Gaslight’s simple approach to Gothic melodrama made it a runaway success when it premiered in 1938. And after Ingrid Bergman’s iconic 1944 film adaptation, ‘gaslight’ became a shorthand for attempting to convince someone that their reality is wrong. Now, there’s not a ‘gaslight, girlboss, gatekeep’ said that doesn’t implicitly recall Hamilton’s classic tale. And as this arresting new adaptation from writers Johnna Wright and Patty Jamieson shows, Hamilton’s script still has much to offer, and plenty to fear.
Bella (Geraldine Hakewill) is our girlboss. Mourning her mother and father, she meets the charismatic Jack Manningham (Toby Schmitz) who she quickly marries. But soon after the pair move to London Bella is haunted by bumps in the night and flickering gaslights. “Unfortunate delusions”, her husband calls them. But, despite his attempts to convince her of her madness, Bella eventually finds the source of these nightly horrors; more monstrous for having an intimate, and very real source.
Hamilton’s script is balanced on a knife’s edge between emotions and styles; switching from humour to horror. Daphne Du Maurier-like Gothic melodrama is interspersed with Hitchcock whodunnit, and pulpy horror with careful precision. Like turning on that gaslight, it takes a steady hand to balance these complex affinities; a subtle turn of the screw to light the flame. This production features stellar performances and gorgeous design but often struggles to strike the right balance between fidelity to Hamilton’s complex – though aged – approach, and a desire to reimagine it for a modern audience.
Too many moments in the Wright and Jamieson’s script are played out to the audience in a way that seems to apologise for the script’s now predictable politics and minimalistic approach to inducing horror; too many earnest scenes exaggerated in ways that read like a knowing wink to a contemporary audience. ‘Yes, we know this is silly’, the actors seem to say, delivering lines like they’ve been written by Mel Brooks. Hamilton’s story can be silly, sure, but as any lover of a good B-grade horror will tell you, that’s not necessarily something to apologise for. Truly effective comedic performances from Courtney Cavallaro as the biting maid, Nancy and Kate Fitzpatrick as the dryly witty head of the household, Elizabeth, are sadly lost to this misread of the original’s humour and pulpy appeal.
Moments of genuine horror come when director Lee Lewis finds the sweet spot between Hamilton’s Gothic-melodramatic style and its often-delicate but always sensationalist approach to employing it. Music and sound design by Paul Charlier is exaggerated just enough; the subtle click and spark of turning on a gaslight made as terrifying as a thunderous storm or a well-timed lightning crack. Original compositions, too, resemble the lush orchestrations of a 1960s Les Baxter score pared down to John Carpenter-style sparsity; a combination of simple piano riffs and sweeping violas that make each scene transition thrum with dread.
Paul Jackson’s lighting design, too, strikes a similar balance. Honey-coloured yellows and chilling blues pouring in from an open window signal the transition from night to day with a ballet-like elegance that casts Reéne Mulder’s impressive set in dramatic shadows that move and skitter with a terrifying liveliness.
As Bella and Jack, Hakewill and Schmitz are mostly effective at navigating the script’s complex changes in tone and mood. Hakewill is particularly impressive as Bella, moving seamlessly between paranoid and assured; naturalistic and melodramatic with the subtlety of a twitching eye and elegant stride or the high theatricality of an ear-splitting scream and soap-opera gasp.
Schmitz’s performance is less effective. There’s something delightfully Vincent Price-esq about the odd rhythms in his speaking voice and his eccentric physicality. He’s psychopathic, but strangely dowdy, as if he’s stumbled into his deception by necessity rather than intentionally. It’s an understandable read on Wright and Jamieson’s writing, which disempowers Jack and his threatening masculinity by making it a cliché we should laugh at. But it does sap scenes of violence in act two of some of their effectiveness when Schmitz has to switch from laughable psychopath to a real physical threat.
Hamilton’s show has certainly aged, and this adaptation doesn’t do much to revive it. But for all this production’s failings, there’s simply too much to enjoy and fear throughout, even if that enjoyment at times resembles cringing and laughing your way through the schmaltz of a B-grade horror classic. This kind of pulpy Gothic horror is too rare of a sight in Melbourne theatre and it’s ultimately just too well-executed here to be missed.
Gaslight is playing at the Comedy Theatre until March 24 and tickets are available here.