Steve Willis as Jack, Chris Harper as a Pc,
Martin Bourne as Rough and Jenna Rodway as Bella
Gaslight
Swan Theatre Amateur Company
***
We open on a foggy night in a gaslit,
upper middleclass London home, sometime around 1870, with a patriarchal
husband in obvious charge and a nervous, subservient wife showing
anxiety and even fear at his every word.
We are in classic Victorian melodrama territory,
except nothing is as it seems. Like, Bella, the mentally fragile wife,
we are being deceived, manipulated by what has become a classic
psychological thriller
Patrick Hamiltion’s play was written in 1938 and
has the distinction of spawning the derivative term gaslighting, first
used in the 1950s, a word now synonymous with psychological abuse.
Bella Manningham is in mental turmoil, she is
afraid she is going mad, a deep-rooted fear as we are to discover later.
It is a wonderful and faultless performance from Jenna Rodway. Her fear
is palpable and in the intimate confines of the studio, she even makes
the audience nervous, leaving us all on edge as her mind is stripped of
reason by her manipulative husband, Jack.
He quietly prods and goads her, feigning concern,
even offering help, as he slowly builds her case for madness and perhaps
committal to a home in what seems to have become his rather cruel game.
Steve Willis is a wonderfully evil Jack in
another flawless performance. He could rant and rave, glare menacingly,
after all he is the baddy in all this, even add a threat of violence
here and there perhaps, but he uses a much more subtle delivery with not
so much threats as nuanced consequences, a quiet, almost reasonable
approach in a superficial way, but oh so chilling. The lurking threat is
there, waiting to catch Bella, in every quiet, precise delivery. Even
his promise of a treat is merely a stick disguised as a carrot that he
can use to beat her later.
Gemma Matthews as the maid, Nancy, with
Bella and Jack in the background
To watch him toy with her mind and emotions is
the heart of the play, the original gaslighting,. We watch Bella's slow
descent into madness, a madness being manufactured and created by her
husband.
We can see Jack's feeling of superiority in the
way he not only treats his wife, but his servants, for example, calling
Elizabeth, the cook-cum-housekeeper, upstairs from the kitchen to put
coal on the fire from the coal scuttle less than a yard away from his
feet. He sees himself as definitely the master of all he surveys, house,
wife, servants . . .
Elizabeth, on £16 a year we are told, is played
with bustling awareness of her place in the pecking order by Michelle
Whitfield, while Jack can also afford a second servant, Nancy, on a far
more reasonable £10 a year. Gemma Matthews gives us a flighty Nancy,
younger, attractive and with charms you, and indeed Jack, suspect could
rise above merely serving tea and putting coal on fires into a more,
should we say . . . wanton nature.
He controls his world with not so much an iron
fist as a quiet, chilling tongue, never defied, never questioned, never
confronted . . . until the mysterious Rough appears, retired Det Insp
Rough, played by Martin Bourne.
Rough is the antidote to Jack, with secrets to
tell as well as the ability to see though Jack's methods all the while
offering Bella a chance to escape.
There is a tongue in cheek element to Rough's
performance in that he plays a little with her emotions, gently and
without malice, showing her how she was being fooled by a man, who, in
truth she hardly knew at all, despite a marriage of seven years.
Unfortunately, a flurry of prompts ensued which
played havoc with context and pace, something that hopefully will
evaporate with first night out of the way.
Rough is the catalyst for a whole new story
involving our Mr Manningham, explaining why he bought the house, why the
gas lights dim in the evening, why items go missing, why Bella forgets
so much, why Rough has even arrived.
Jack's mental cruelty started as the story and
Rough elevates him to the centre of the plot as we work towards a
dramatic end.
The intimacy of the studio makes this an intense
production with powerful performances from the husband and wife leads on
a simple but effective parlour set. With first night out of the way
prompts and details should now have been sorted and director Jane Lush
will have a fine drama on her hands. The gas lights will be flickering
to 25-10-25 and will be relit at The Coach House Theatre, Malvern, 19-22
November.
Roger Clarke
22-10-25
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