By Marlo Ihler

Prepare yourselves for a bit of mystery and suspense this fall when the Utah Shakespearean Festival presents Patrick Hamilton’s classic Victorian thriller, Gaslight.

Written by Hamilton in 1938 and set in London in the mid-1880s, Gaslight—also known as Angel Street — tells a chilling story of deception and paranoia. Bella Manningham is suffering from what she believes are the early stages of insanity, a disease from which her mother died. Her husband, John Manningham, once loving, spends his evenings out on the town in order to deal with the stress of his wife’s illness.

Several things have affected Bella’s anxious state of mind. She believes ghosts haunt their home as the gaslights often inexplicably change intensity and flicker ominously, and she is unable to explain why she seems to continuously misplace objects.

It soon becomes evident that these misplaced items are not her doing at all, but her husband’s. John is purposefully arranging these petty irregularities in order to slowly drive his wife insane and torture her into believing they are her fault.

Thus the term “gaslighting” entered the English language, coined directly from this play. It refers to a form of psychological abuse where there is a deliberate attempt to gradually convince someone they are losing their grip on reality, usually for the purpose of gaining some sort of advantage over them.

One must ask then: what advantage is John trying to gain over Bella? To what extent will he go in order to achieve it? Those details drive the storyline and remain part of the mystery until the end of this suspenseful and intriguing psychological drama.
“Enter into a world of mystery, gaslight, secrets, hushed fears, paranoia, and the stark edge of madness,” explained director J.R. Sullivan.

During the time of this play and the decades immediately following, psychology as a scientific field was becoming more readily accepted; and, as it did, so did literature exploring the matters of the mind. The novella The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James (whose brother was William James, a prominent American psychologist) and the short stories “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” by Ernest Hemingway and “Barn Burning” by William Faulkner are examples of literature that employ psychological concepts.

“Gaslight is a brilliantly crafted pyschological melodrama. The audience members will find themselves emotionally overwhelmed,” said Festival Founder Fred C. Adams. “The immediacy of this stage play adds to the terror and tension for the audience.”