In the autumn of 2011, I played Bella Manningham in an amateur dramatic production of Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 thriller Gas Light, which has given its name to the practice of deliberately undermining someone’s conception of their own sanity for selfish or sinister purposes. Bella is the wife who sees lights flicker, whose things won’t stay where she left them, who is increasingly convinced that she is disappearing deeper and deeper into her own mad mind. “You mustn’t go on lying here in the dark, or […]
“Rows of houses all bearing down on me / I can feel their blue hands touching me”
The Hours Before Dawn (1958) by Celia Fremlin
