Gaslighting is a form of manipulation that occurs in abusive relationships. The highly successful play was adapted into two feature films, one in 1940 and one in 1944, both titled Gaslight. always thinking it’s your fault when things go wrong.feeling like everything you do is wrong.often wondering if you’re being too sensitive.being more anxious and less confident than you used to be.no longer feeling like the person you used to be.The answer is “No.” Often, “Gaslight” is inaccurately mentioned as a Hitchcock movie. … The remake will be set in California rather than London. Imy Wyatt Corner’s production is at the Playground theatre, London, from 21 October until 10 November.Directed by George Cukor, Gaslight starred Charles Boyer as the sinister husband who tried to drive his fragile young bride insane, played by Bergman, so that he could gain control of her family’s jewels. Richard Beecham’s production of Gaslight is at Watford Palace theatre until 26 October. “Now is a very good time to revisit the play,” she says, and “consider what – if anything – has changed.” It has become a buzzword, she says, “but also in some ways lost any attachment to the actual gravity of this type of abuse and the sensitivity this topic can require”. Ninety-seven per cent of defendants prosecuted in these cases were male.īut Corner is concerned about the prevalence of the term in the media. The Crown Prosecution Service recorded 960 offences of coercive and controlling behaviour between 20, a three-fold increase from the previous year. Having first read the play 10 years ago, Corner was inspired to direct it because “its depiction of abusive relationships has not dated and remains alarmingly relevant”. Inevitably, lighting will play a large part in this she cites the film Midsommar as an inspiration. She wants to “push the audience to feel uneasy – even scared”. Her version will retain the Victorian setting and look to horror for inspiration. Imy Wyatt Corner’s forthcoming production for the Playground theatre in London will stick more closely to Hamilton’s original. Jasmine Jones and Hannah Hutch in Gaslight at the Watford Palace theatre. Watford Palace’s artistic director Brigid Larmour stipulated that if he was to direct it there would need to be an otherwise all-female creative team.Įmotionally complex. Is there not, I ask, also an issue with a man directing a cast of women in a play about emotional control and power imbalance? It’s something they’ve discussed. Beecham has merged the character with the figure of the drama therapist and has “pruned the text to remove some of the lazy sexism and the patronising attitudes”. In Kai Fischer’s production for Perth theatre, a woman – Meg Fraser – was cast in the role. The character of the police inspector Rough, who is Bella’s rescuer, can be problematic for a director today: he is another dominating male presence. This approach also means that, in the context of Beecham’s production, a survivor of abuse is also taking on the role of the abuser, which makes the scene in which Jack attacks Bella more emotionally complex. The cast are simultaneously playing the women in the refuge as well as Hamilton’s characters, so when Bella delivers an impassioned speech towards the end, it becomes “a sort of exorcism”. The cast created individual backstories for the modern women they are playing and they remained in character when a care worker took them through a workshop designed for survivors of abuse. To prepare, Beecham worked closely with a women’s refuge. His production has an all-female cast playing survivors of domestic abuse who are enacting Hamilton’s play as an exercise in drama therapy. There have already been revivals at Perth theatre and the Mill at Sonning a version starring Martin Shaw is touring the UK and another Gaslight is coming to the Playground theatre in London.īeecham was inspired by Safe at Last, a Channel 4 documentary that allowed cameras behind the doors of a women’s refuge. The Watford production is one of several Gaslights staged this year. The protagonist of the Gorse trilogy is a predator, a superficially charming swindler who takes advantage of women. His obsession with Soho sex worker Lily Connolly made its way into Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. “He was a complicated man and, reading his biography, it seems he had some understanding of some of the behaviours he’s writing about.” Hamilton’s tendency to become infatuated with unsuitable women seeped into his fiction. “Patrick Hamilton the commercial playwright could never quite leave behind Hamilton the literary novelist,” says Beecham. Watch Ingrid Bergman in a scene from the 1944 film Gaslight
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