NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ontario — No one came to rescue Bella Manningham. And this is a good thing.
Bella, the seemingly self-inflicted damsel in distress at the center of “Gaslight,” has been a source of pity for theater and movie audiences for over 80 years. But when Johnna Wright and Patty Jamieson dusted off Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 melodrama, set in 1880, for this year’s Shaw Festival, they imagined a very different fate for their heroine.
“We didn’t want to change the rules of Victorian society and how they affected women,” Wright said. “Our question was, is there a way for her to play by those rules and win?”
And so they embarked on an ambitious reboot of the play, keeping the spooky setting (a Victorian drawing room) and basic premise (is Bella losing her mind?), but dropping a major character. Gone is Detective Rough, the cunning inspector who puts everything in order and explains everything to poor, poor Bella. The result is a total overhaul, with a nifty Act I curtain that compels the audience to spill out into the hall, sputtering, “What should she do now?”
These stifling rules weren’t limited to onstage action, said “Gaslight” director Kelli Fox. “I think the piece was originally written for an audience that still expected that demure version of femininity,” she said. “They wanted a story about a male hero coming to the rescue.”
To some extent, current events have made “Gaslight” more topical but also more predictable. Its very title gives an indication of the trust audiences should place in Jack, Bella’s ever-caring husband. In fact, the term “gaslighting” – psychologically manipulating people into questioning their own sanity – has its origins in the room, in which the gas lamps in the house flicker on and off in the evenings. where Bella is alone, making her question her own sanity.
The concept has survived in psychological circles for decades, but has only made its way into mainstream society in recent years, to the point that the American Dialect Society has honored the word as “the most useful/likely to succeed ” in 2016.
“What’s weird,” Wright said, “is that we started writing this before ‘gaslighting’ became a big deal in the news. Maybe we felt that was coming .
In her review of the play for the Toronto Star, Karen Fricker called it “a very satisfying piece of theatrical reinvention”, suggesting that viewers “bring a smart friend to this show and then share in the pleasure of combing through this happened, to pick up clues. and retrospective evidence.
“Gaslight” is one of the few plays at the Shaw Festival, held in this bucolic town 20 miles north of Niagara Falls in honor of Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, to address the idea of gender and femininity This year.
Also at the Royal George Theater is ‘Chitra’, in one act by Rabindranath Tagore, based on a tale from the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, about a warrior princess who temporarily abandons her ‘manly’ tendencies to attract an archer of world renown. And the festival will expand to its full repertoire of 11 shows next month to include one of August Wilson’s plays of the century, ‘Gem of the Ocean’, which features the matriarch to end all the matriarchs: 285-year-old Aunt Ester Tyler. The three works will then take place until the beginning of October.
For Kimberley Rampersad, who both directed and choreographed “Chitra,” the 1892 play (translated into English from the original Sanskrit in 1913) was a natural fit for the festival: “Shaw and Tagore were both polymaths, and you can feel their politics evolving through their words,” she said. But it’s also a reminder that such adjustments can be found outside of the Western canon. “I chose this not to be disrespectful but to prove a point,” she said.
Chitra’s gender fluidity resonated with Rampersad since she was a young girl: “My parents call me their ‘boy’ – I know, I know – and my dad said to me, ‘There’s a play on you.'” (In the sort of dizzying cross-casting that’s common at the Shaw Festival, Rampersad also plays the staunchly and eternally feminine Lola in “Damn Yankees,” which also features “Gaslight” co-writer Jamieson in its cast.)
For “Gaslight,” Jamieson and Wright said they originally planned to just stray from Hamilton’s piece here and there, but quickly realized a gut renovation was needed to tell the story they wanted. to tell about. “I don’t know if there’s any original dialogue left in our version,” Wright said.
Another modification was to add shades of good and evil among the play’s female characters. One of the daily stresses Bella faces is a “new girl,” a housekeeper who is sassy and lazy to say the least — and maybe a little worse.
“It’s pretty boring to just make it a battle of the sexes,” Wright said.
This battle was central to several works by Shaw, who is considered the first major playwright to portray what has come to be known as New Woman. (Rampersad said her first exposure to her work came from reading “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” which takes a sympathetic view of sex work. She remembers thinking, “A man wrote this?”)
Much has been made of the changing “mandate” of the Shaw Festival, which originally limited its repertoire to Shaw and works written during its (usefully long) life. The remit then expanded to more recent works set during Shaw’s lifetime, and then expanded again to include essentially any play Shaw might have liked.
In this case, “Chitra” and “Gaslight” both qualified under the original settings. (Shaw died in 1950.) But Fox, who spent many years in the Shaw Festival acting ensemble before focusing on directing, recalls feeling paralyzed by many of the roles thrown at her. offered here and elsewhere. “There was a time, in my mid-thirties, when I said, ‘I would like to stop playing a naive child now. Can I be a woman?
One of those parts happened to be there. It just hadn’t been rewritten yet.
