Decades before “gaslighting” became a thing people talked about, a villainous Victorian set about convincing his submissive spouse that she was losing her increasingly muddled mind in Patrick Hamilton’s classic thriller Gaslight, a mouthwateringly melodramatic treat from Pacific Resident Theatre.

It doesn’t take us more than a minute or so to realize that Jack Manningham (Jaxon Duff Gwillim) is not a particularly nice man, or at least not when he’s around his easily cowed wife Bella (Tania Getty).

And it only takes another minute or two for us to witness Jack accuse the missus of having taken down one of the pictures hanging on their sitting room wall and hiding it somewhere inside the gloomy London house they call home not-so-sweet home.

It definitely doesn’t help Bella’s mental state when Jack flirts openly with saucy young housemaid Nancy (Miranda Wynne) or has Nancy and veteran servant Elizabeth (Rita Obermeyer) kiss the Bible before swearing they haven’t been pilfering from the Manningham home but refuses to accept Bella’s own protestations of innocence.

And this is just the beginning of two hours of scrumdiddlyumptious suspense.

Audiences watching Gaslight when it premiered in London’s West End in 1938 or when it debuted three years later on Broadway (retitled Angel Street) might not have figured out right away that Jack was doing his damnedest to send his wife off to the loony bin, but that was before Charles Boyer made it his business to drive Ingrid Bergman mad in George Cukor’s 1944 suspense classic.

Still, even knowing from the get-go that the crazy one is not Bella but her maniacal mate detracts not a whit from the pleasure of watching him do his dirty deeds, or the excitement engendered when police detective Rough (Stuart W. Howard) arrives at the Manningham home bent on rescuing Bella from a man with at least one murder already on his rap sheet.

As to why Jack married Bella to begin with, or what he hopes to gain by driving her insane, well for that you’ll just have to head over to Pacific Resident Theatre to savor Gaslight’s many pleasures, not the least of which is watching the whole thing unfold in relentlessly real time (save a brief jump two-thirds of the way through).

In other words, there’s scarcely a moment when the tension lets up even a tad, and with director Michael Rothhaar keeping his entire cast on the same heightened but never scenery-chewing page, I’ve rarely had so much fun being kept on the edge of my seat.

A fabulous Getty plays victimized Victorian Bella to the hilt, while Gwillim embues Mr. Manningham with such mellifluous, merciless menace that I couldn’t wait to see him get his comeuppance at the hands of the equally splendid Howard’s determined dynamo of a police inspector.

Wynne makes shameless minx Nancy as conniving as she is pretty, Obermeyer does solid work as the stolid Elizabeth, and just wait until gifted PRT newcomers Harold Newman and Roger Purnell show up in the play’s final moments for the most unexpected of eleventh-hour surprises.

Scenic designer Taubert Nadalini has done a terrific job of creating a darkly elegant London living room on a budget, no one does Victorian finery any finer than costume designer Shon LeBlanc, and Michael Franco’s lighting adds to Gaslight’s moody appeal as does Clair German’s spooky sound design.

Getty doubles as producer. Ariel Leight Cohen is intimacy director. Cybelle Kaehler is stage manager. Judith Borne is publicist.

Precisely the kind of thriller folks are talking about when they say, “They don’t write’em like that anymore,” Gaslight may no longer be as edgy as it probably was for pre-WWII Londoners, but that doesn’t detract an iota from its many pleasures. Even in 2025, audiences can expect to be delighted to death.

Pacific Resident Theatre, 703 Venice Blvd, Venice.
www.PacificResidentTheatre.com

–Steven Stanley
July 5, 2025
Photos: Phil Cass, James Morris

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Tags: Los Angeles Theater Review, Pacific Resident Theatre, Patrick Hamilton