Rushen Players

Gas Light

by Patrick Hamilton
MAY 2025
Thursday 22nd to Saturday 24th: Curtain 7:30pm
Erin Arts Centre, Port Erin
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These notes are to provide a little more background information to the play
than we are able to fit in the paper programme

Director’s Notes

Welcome to the Rushen Players’ production of Gaslight

Gaslight by Patrick Hamilton

Gaslight is a 1938 thriller play, set in 1880's London, written by the British novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton.
Hamilton's play is a dark tale of a marriage based on deceit and trickery and a husband comitted to
driving his wife insane in ordeer to steal from her.

Patrick Hamilton (1904-1962) was well regarded by Graham Greene and J B Priestley and study of his novels has been revived
because of their distinctive style, deploying a Dickensian narrative.

The play offers great insight as to how the term 'gaslighting' came about and has now become common parlance.
Gaslighting is the manipulation oby psycological means of a person (or group) whichn causes them to doubt themselves,
their capabilities or their sense of reality.

Hamilton began acting in 1921 and then, fascinated by theatrical melodrama, took to writing.
He became known with the novel Craven House (1926). A number of successful motion pictures were based on works by Hamilton.
His play Rope (first performed 1929; U.S. title Rope’s End) was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock under the title Rope (1948).
His play Gaslight was phenomenally successful; first performed in London in 1938, it was later produced in New York City under the title Angel Street.
Two film adaptations were made: the first was British-made, released in 1940 as Gaslight and re-released in the United States in 1952 as Angel Street;
and the second, released in 1944 in the United States as Gaslight and in Great Britain as Murder in Thornton Square,
was directed by George Cukor and starred Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer.
From Hamilton’s novel Hangover Square (1941), the motion picture of the same title (1945) was made.

Hamilton also wrote novels portraying the unpleasantness of the modern city: The Midnight Bell (1929) and The Plains of Cement (1934),
both included in the volume Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935).

Rushen Players first perfromed Gaslight in 1954.

Click here to see the performance details.

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