Patrick Hamilton’s play Gaslight (1938) surely ranks as the least likely cultural touchstone of our age. A middling melodrama about a suspicious husband, a nervy wife, and some dramatically expedient lost jewels, it made a minor splash on Broadway before being adapted twice for the screen, the second starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer in 1944 (Bergman won her first Oscar in the role). Decades passed and the work was largely forgotten, until the play’s title resurfaced as a byword for a particular category of coercive control. Manipulating a person into doubting their perceptions, even their own sanity, became known as gaslighting.

This new-found fame has arguably killed the play, even if this recent adaptation by Canadian playwrights Johnna Wright and Patty Jamieson valiantly attempts to revive the corpse. The problem, evident in the opening minutes of this production, is that any skerrick of suspense or mystery is neutered by the fact that we now know precisely what gaslighting means; the question of whether it’s a case of madness or manipulation has already been answered by the title.  ‘You fool,’ we want to cry out, ‘he’s gaslighting you!’