Gas Light (known in the USA as Angel Street) is a 1938 play by the British dramatist Patrick Hamilton. The play (and its film adaptations) gave rise to the term gaslighting with the meaning "a form of psychological abuse in which false information is presented to the victim with the intent of making him/her doubt his/her own memory and perception".
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The play is set in fog-bound London in 1880 at the lower middle class home of Jack Manningham and his wife Bella. It is late afternoon, a time which Hamilton notes as being the time "before the feeble dawn of gaslight and tea".
At the opening of the drama Bella is clearly on edge, and the stern reproaches from her overbearing husband (who flirts with the servants) makes matters worse. What most perturbs Bella is Manningham's unexplained disappearances from the house: he will not tell her where he is going, and this increases her anxiety. As the drama unfolds, it becomes clear that Manningham is intent on convincing Bella that she is going mad, even to the point of assuring her she is 'imagining' the gas light in the house is dimming.
The appearance of a police detective called Rough soon leads Bella to realise that far from going mad, she is married to a psychopath. Rough explains that the apartment above was once occupied by one Alice Barlow, a wealthy woman who was murdered for her jewels but that the murderer never uncovered them.
In fact, Manningham goes to the flat each night, searching for the jewels and causing the light in the house below to go down. Rough convinces Bella to assist him in exposing Manningham as the murderer, which she does, but not before she takes revenge on Manningham by pretending to help him escape. At the last minute she reminds him that, having gone 'mad', she is not accountable for her actions. The play closes with Manningham being led away by the police.
Gas Light was an immense hit on its release, and it remains one of the longest-running non-musicals in Broadway history.[1] It remains a perennial favourite with both repertory and amateur theatre companies.
The play Gas Light was adapted for film twice: the 1940 British film Gaslight, directed by Thorold Dickinson, and the 1944 American film of the same name, directed by George Cukor. When the British film version was released in America, it played as Angel Street, the New York title for the original British play, to avoid confusion with the American film.