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

Gaslight defenition