Gaslight's cast outshines its script in a dark tale that's painfully relevant

Knowing that the lovers die in the end doesn't make the Bard's previous acts of verse any less masterful (perhaps a line about roses and their perfume is a bit on the nose here), any more than knowing that Jane Eyre gets her man in the end, even if he is deformed in compensation, makes the story of her fraught connection to the 'Madwoman in the Attic' any less compelling.

Still, it feels like it has become a convention of modern storytelling that the success of the whole enterprise should rest on its revelatory ending like some huge and unwieldily inverted pyramid. And failing to make the whole thing dance on the proverbial pinpoint is somehow a sign of systemic failure throughout.

Surely, such an idea is doomed to failure more often than success. But perhaps that's an argument for another time.

For the sake of not starting a minor riot, we won't spoil the ending of Gaslight, which opened at Civic Theatre on Wednesday evening for a short run, closing on June 23. But suffice it to say that the ending - while compelling and sufficiently dramatic for the genre - doesn't really matter. The story is told well by a small cast that shows a masterful control of their parts, and knowing the end certainly doesn't spoil the rewatch value. I'd be back again tonight if the show would have me after reading this.

In brief: Rodney Rigby's production for NewTheatricals and Queensland Theatre, directed by Lee Lewis and adapted by Canadian writers Patty Jamieson and Johnna Wright from Patrick Hamilton's 1938 script of the same name, spins a thriller that fits like hand in glove among the golden age of detective fiction.

Bella Manningham has come to live in an opulent house in London at the turn of the 20th Century with her new husband Jack, served by their brutally stoic maid Elizabeth and recent housekeeper-hire Nancy.

The plot follows Bella's seeming descent into madness as she appears to hear things rattling around in the attic, apparently compulsively hides her belongings only to accuse the staff of stealing them, and struggles with her husband's inexplicable absences. All the while, Jack plays the outwardly doting husband and manly rationalist to Bella's distinctly feminine irrationalism.

The compelling story famously inspired the modern use of the term "gaslight" to describe how villains manipulate their victims into questioning their own sanity to ensnare them in further abuse.

It goes without saying that this story, so firmly set in the past, is positively dripping with modern relevance, evidenced (as if any were needed) by the audible gasps and groans from a near-capacity audience Wednesday night, June 19, as the players went through the paces on stage.

This tale of domestic abuse is compellingly, insistently, sometimes excruciatingly familiar.

But while we're on the plot, Jamieson and Wright's adaptation makes one notable deviation from Hamilton's source material by doing away with the fifth member of the original cast - the male detective Rough - who arrives towards the end of the second act to unravel the mystery. Instead, this time it was the heroine Bella who is allowed to claw back some agency in the end and solve the mystery first-hand.

It's a testament to Geraldine Hakewill's on-stage presence that even as she seems to dissemble the machinations that have tormented her throughout the story, she never loses her grip on her performance. As she toys with her villain, there's a sense (again to an audible response from the pit) that she's masterfully and even gleefully toying with her audience as well.

In the absence of Hamilton's deus ex detective, Bella's journey from agitation to near madness and back out of the underworld as her own redeemer is set against the similarly absent - but nonetheless impactful - Alice Barlow, whose painting appears in the first act and hangs over the remaining performance like a ghost.

Barlow is the murdered former tenant of the Manningham home and the storied owner of the Barlow rubies - a set of priceless jewels, the attempted robbery of which we're led to believe cost her her life.

Barlow's spectral memory appears peppered throughout the production, described by Bella and the maid Elizabeth as a fierce, spritely and precocious figure who flaunted her wealth in life and seemingly lived unrepentantly.

Her image, which remains illuminated throughout the production by one of the countless stunning tricks of a truly exceptional set design, is reflected in a metaphorical dark mirror against Bella's hemmed-in ingenue tortured to distraction by the constraints of her abusive relationship.

The image of Bella in her near-bridal white gradually constricted by a set at once splendidly opulent and yet claustrophobic in its stasis (there are no scene changes here) casts Barlow as her dark double (to borrow a phrase from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's 1979 feminist study of Victorian literature, its female characters and the women who wrote them).

The nod to the "madwoman in the attic" is pushed a little further as Bella starts to apparently hear something (or someone) knocking about in the unseen and sealed-up room upstairs that we're told is filled with the murdered Barlow's belongings.

Of course, Barlow remains a spectral image only throughout the production, but her presence in the tale as neither angel nor monster is a cleverly winking complement as Bella wrestles with her own aesthetic ideal, similarly as neither the Angel in the House (another Victorian-era trope) nor ever truly the Madwoman in the Attic.

Against Hakewill's elegantly balanced performance, Toby Schmitz shows a similarly polished professionalism as Jack, and an equal control over his Janus-faced depiction of a husband apparently wrestling with his seemingly deranged (modern readers would surely say: independent) wife.

Veteran actor Kate Fitzpatrick is the steady hand on the tiller in a small cast and is a comforting presence on stage even as she too doesn't escape suspicion throughout. And Courtney Cavallaro's role as Nancy often feels too small for the actor's clearly prodigious talent; she bounces out of every scene and captivates with every line.

The skeletal cast of only four parts is hard to separate for talent and limelight in this pared-back tale. The players vanish into their roles seemingly with ease, know each other's cues, and admirably bear the weight of a script that sometimes struggles to manage its own loose threads.

In a genre renowned for its contrivances and railroaded story beats, the occasional loose end or unresolved moment stands out and is the rare blight on an otherwise tight romp that the cast nevertheless manages to take in its stride.

But, like we say, the ending isn't as important here as how the story is told.

The overheard conversation in the men's room at intermission was telling: "Now I'm wondering if I really did "lose" all my brother's Star Wars toys".

So was this, as my partner and I mulled over Bella's "madness" (using the inverted commas as a precaution) over an after-show dram at Coal and Cedar: I had asked if she thought Bella was really mad in the end, and she said it didn't matter. "It wasn't her fault."