The Gaslighter of Angel Street

Denying the dark light its air

“Gaslighter,” Gelli Print, Beth Kephart

This play “tells the demoniac story of the Manninghams of Angel Street. Under the guise of kindliness, handsome Mr. Manningham is torturing his wife into insanity. He accuses her of petty aberrations that he has arranged himself…”

“Act One: The Curtain rises upon the rather terrifying darkness of the late afternoon—the zero hour, as it were, before the feeble dawn of gas light and tea.” 

Some pages in, heap-of-nerves Mrs. Manningham, speaking to the policeman Rough, who, having heard of nefarious goings-on from a chatty maid, has arrived to investigate:

“In this house, I can tell everything by the light of the gas. You see the mantle there. Now it’s burning full. But if an extra light went on in the kitchen or someone lit it in the bedroom then this one would sink down. It’s the same all over the house…. Every night, after he goes out, I find myself waiting for something. Then all at once I look round the room and see that the light is slowly going down. Then I hear tapping sounds—persistent tapping sounds. At first I tried not to notice it, but after a time it began to get on my nerves.”

Who among us does not know a Mr. Manningham of Angel Street—decoratively kind, maybe not so handsome but surely preening, whose primary game is the predictable game of incremental torture? He’s got the paws and you’re the cat and the sound is swat, and maybe you think you can outlast him, maybe you think he’ll grow bored of his own tedious conformance to the crushing resolve of gaslighting which is, to quote Merriam-Webster “to psychologically manipulate (a person) usually over time so that the victim questions the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and experiences confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, and doubts concerning their own emotional or mental stability.” Maybe you think your decorative gaslighter will read one version or the other of the “Victorian thriller” by Patrick Hamilton and decide that it’s really not that pioneering after all to bloody reality with lies.

Or maybe you will exercise the powers of your own dignity and grace, your own intelligence and resolve, and exit stage left, never to return. Maybe you’ll see the gaslighting for what it is, name it and declare it, and in naming and declaring, rescue yourself, rescue others.

(Here, again, the magnitude of words.)

Denying the tormenter his tormentee. Denying the dark light its air.

And so we rise.

(Quoted material from the program of “Angel Street,” as presented by Shepard Traube at the John Golden Theatre in New York in 1941, based on the play “Gas Light” by Patrick Hamilton.)