Narcissists us gaslighting is to make their victim feel like they are going crazy and can’t trust their own mind. It can involve subtle tactics, such as constant criticism, or more extreme measures, such as denying the victim’s experiences or reality. Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse that causes the victim to doubt their own sanity. The plot of the play revolves around a man who tries to make his wife believe that she is going crazy by manipulating her environment and dimming the gas lights in their home. Gaslighting originated from a play called Gas Light, which was first performed in 1938. I will also discuss some examples of gaslighting so that you can better identify it if it happens to you. In this blog post, I will explore the origins of the word and discuss what narcissist gaslighting is. It can be very effective in erasing your memory of events and can make you feel like you are always the one who is wrong. Here, meaning is screamed so loudly from every inch of this production, and you’d really have to be mad to miss it.If you’ve ever been in a relationship of any type with a narcissist, you may be familiar with the term “gaslighting.” This is a tactic that narcissists use to make the people around them doubt their own sanity. Meanwhile, the staged world around her gives no voice to such subtlety of interpretation. “You read meanings into everything, Bella dear”, chides Mr. It’s kitsch right until it culminates in the type of satirical arrest that could’ve been ripped straight out of the pages of the Beano. While Designer David Woodhead’s chintzy set is just distorted enough to whisper that something isn’t quite right – its contorted walls thrusting the ceiling into prominence, and forcing us to contemplate the all-important top floor – the rest of this production is all ghosts in mirrors, and hidden trapdoors, flashing lights, and supernatural glows. But small details are not the focus in this production. It is through the small details, though, the dimming of the lamps as he sneaks around the house, that she pieces together a sense of suspicion. Manningham gets away with murder, remaining immune to his wife’s accusations by encouraging her to doubt her own credibility. Banks’s version is knowing in all the wrong places: it refuses to be informed by retrospective understandings of this play, but is far too deliberate and ironically insincere to let us truly experience those antiquated trembles.Īnd by being too knowledgeable about illness, madness, class and gender politics, Banks dilutes Gaslight’s central thrill. Swimming in slow motion through the space, she poses in each movement, as if fully aware that she is being observed. There are comic pauses before the most dated of utterances, and Tointon – all held breath and poised hands, breathy exclamations and nervous emphasis on every word – is over-directed beyond belief. Until the final moments, either of the characters could be guilty of manipulation, or of exploiting the values of their time to get one over their partner.īut on stage, these revealing lines are delivered with too great a self-awareness. In the script, Hamilton leaves room for interpretation.
In response to his wicked accusations, poor Bella (Kara Tointon) passionately cries, “If I do these things, I must certainly be going off my head”. “There’s a good child”, coos Jack Manningham (Rupert Young), the gaslighting husband to his young wife. On paper, some of the lines bear a definite clout. It’s difficult to find enjoyment, originality or indeed thill in this simple revisitation of a pre-war historical pastiche. No, it’s a period story, sanitised in its historical bubble – and in leaving his production to stagnate beyond these two temporal filters, Banks has truly missed a trick.
This is not a production about the violence of the mind, a biting clash of personalities that just so happens to find itself inside a period context. Unfortunately, across this production, Director Anthony Banks refuses to bring the contemporary horror of this phrase back to inform its Melodramatic Victorian origins. Reeking of madness and manipulation, the theme has a lot of theatrical potential – and so it comes as no surprise that the phrase has its origins in Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, Gas Light. You may’ve heard of gaslighting, the form of psychological abuse where a perpetrator persuades their victim, typically a spouse or partner, that they are losing the plot.