Classic thriller Gaslight hits the Eastbourne stage

Bella Manningham is a woman on the edge. She hears footsteps in the night, pictures are moving by themselves and the gaslights in the drawing room dim and flicker without so much as a touch. Her husband is constantly disappearing. He tells her she may be losing her mind and she starts to believe him. As her grip on reality begins to slip, she finds herself in the middle of a terrifying mystery.

Phil and Ben are delighted to bring back to the stage Patrick Hamilton’s mid-20th century masterpiece – a thriller which can genuinely claim to have created a term used in present-day UK law. If you gaslight someone, you manipulatively plants seeds of uncertainty in their mind in order to gain power and control over them. Self-doubt and constant questioning slowly cause them to question their reality – and that’s precisely what is happening to Bella.

As Ben says: “It's a Victorian thriller in that it was set in Victorian times but it was actually written just before the Second World War and I think that's what makes it so smart. A lot of Victorian thrillers can be a bit creaky. The Victorian thrillers tended to be a bit melodramatic but this one is genuinely about the characters and is genuinely chilling.

“It is about a vulnerable young woman whose mother was taken into an asylum and now she is being manipulated into thinking she is going mad but at the end of this story, does she manage to turn everything around? It's a fantastic redemptive ending. It's all about whether she has the power to defy her abuser.”

As Phil says: “It is such a fantastic device in a play. When her husband goes out the lights flicker and fade and she wonders if she's imagining that things are disappearing but then when her husband comes back the lights go up again. It's a fantastic story and hopefully we will really take the audience on a journey.”

The production comes not long after Mark Farrelly brought his one-man show about Gaslight playwright Patrick Hamilton to Eastbourne, The Silence of Snow. As Mark said, Hamilton, celebrated author of Rope, Gaslight and Hangover Square, was a fascinating and ultimately sad individual.

“He is quite an early example of someone that has had massive success very year and has then struggled to cope with it. We are now quite familiar with that phenomenon of how early success can really wreck your life but really it just fascinated me that he was someone who had everything and then lost it all and was dead by the age of 58. He became an alcoholic like most of his family and at the end of his life he was drinking three bottles of whiskey day. J B Priestley knew and admired him and he said ‘Patrick Hamilton needs whisky like a car needs petrol.’ But what also drew me was the wit of the man.”