Thrilling stuff
Robert Gore-Langton talks to Peter Gill and Kenneth Cranham about the Old Vic revival of Gaslight This season's they-don't-make- 'em-like-that-any-more offering at the Old Vic is Gaslight. The chief reason for going to see it is that it stars the talented young actress Rosamund Pike. Time spent gazing at the astoundingly beautiful Miss Pike is never wasted. But Gaslight has other attractions as an entertainment. It's a 1938 three-act thriller set in murky Victorian London, with a married couple, servants, horsehair furniture and a nice juicy vein of psychopathic sadism.
Most of us know it from the 1944 film version in which Ingrid Bergman went mildly bonkers and won an Oscar for rolling her eyes. When you read the play, it is startling how unfaithful are the two Gaslight films (an earlier screen version starred Anton Walbrook). The baddies in both are foreigners so they are obviously up to no good (in the Old Vic version the sinister Mr Manningham will be the very English Andrew Woodall) and there is little trace remaining of the play's author Patrick Hamilton.
Hamilton is a fascinating writer who got rich through two efficient stage thrillers, Rope and Gaslight. He was a Marxist who lived swankily in a set in Albany, had a thing about prostitutes (his father married one) and consumed whisky by the pint, dying of liver failure in 1962 at the age of 58, having written one of the great English novels about drinking, Hangover Square. Hamilton was in a literal sense a piss artist who defined the four stages of inebriation: plain drunk, fighting drunk, blind drunk and dead drunk. His fictional turf was the dreg ends of Earls Court, Soho and Hove — as J.B. Priestley put it, 'a kind of no-man's-land of shabby hotels, dingy boarding houses and all those saloon bars where the homeless can meet'.
On stage Hamilton is still being revisited. Rope (1929) is about a pair of students who kill for kicks and then throw a party, the dinner served from a chest containing the concealed corpse. Keith Baxter's Chichester production in the early 1990s proved the play's worth in a courageously distasteful homoerotic production which went right to the sick heart of the thing. Its closing lines — 'you swine, you filthy swine' — may look terrible in print, but from the theatre stalls they are the work of a master of dramatic tension, cracked nerves and final comeuppance. Gaslight is Rope's sister in spirit, though this revival in the unsuitably vast Old Vic this revival in the unsuitably vast Old Vic will test its box-office legs.
'Ifs what it says it is — a well-written thriller. I have no interest in searching for metaphors,' says Peter Gill, the Leftie writer-director whom you might expect to have given a wide berth to this commercial warhorse. 'I don't feel any need to apologise for it. I once saw it as a young director at Windsor Rep. I remember thinking, "God, this is a good play." But it is what it is. I can't bear the claptrap where people talk about thrillers and musicals as if they are something they are not. It takes away from what they are. There's something in the writing that's got a London tone about it, and you get a hint of a sadness even if it wasn't a thriller with a psychopath husband.'
What about the slut of a maid who features so prominently? 'The maid brings in that Patrick Hamilton obsession you find in his other work with girls from a different class to himself. The sadism is also very well drawn. What I am saying is that if this were not a thriller it would be a play about the classic, terrible, middleclass marriage. Any real entertainment has to have body to it.'
And any thriller has to have a policeman. In Gaslight it is the exInspector Rough, who reactivates a cold case when he recognises the suave husband as a murderer who has returned to the scene of an earlier crime. When you need a detective on stage, you send for Kenneth Cranham, a leading man with 40 years' experience. He was the Plod in An Inspector Calls, J.B. Priestley's potboiler which was miraculously reinvented in a National Theatre revival that ran for most of the 1990s.
'I've played endless f***ing policemen in my time and I've become rather fascinated with Hamilton,' says Cranham cheerily. 'Gaslight and plays like it were part of the old rep system which I never really got to know. Working on it now, I can't believe how Hamilton got away with it. The sexuality and sadism is related to that masterand-slave thing — where the patriarch has access to all these women. Once he starts snogging his staff, you know you're on to something! To me the play is partly about that world of penny dreadfuls, the seaside, the music hall. Whisky is in the play, too; it gets a whole page. Rough, who is an articulate, funny, almost baroque figure, calls it something "between ambrosia and methylated spirits": Hamilton's biographer, Nigel Jones, has a low regard for Gaslight and doesn't even mention in his book that it was a triumph on Broadway (featuring Vincent Price), where it ran under the feeble title Angel Street. In the New York wartime run, it wasn't the fluctuating gas pressure that had the audience going. Every night the inspector would leave his hat, betraying his visit to the house. The audience would literally stand and shout out, 'The hat! The hat!' This monstrously effective bit of stage business (not in the script) was considered the key factor in making Gaslight the longest-running foreign drama in Broadway history.
Peter Gill is most unlikely to stoop to the hat trick, though Cranham rather fancies it. 'Peter wants something grimmer than the gay 1890s. But rest assured we'll be sticking to the play Hamilton wrote, complete with a classic smelling-salts heroine. I think the most unforgivable thing in theatre is having a sore arse at the end of it — a sin Gaslight doesn't commit' 'Gaslight' is at the Old Vic from 7 June. Box office: 0870 060 6628.
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