Gas on stage

PSC opens with a sinister drama

by Robert von Stein Redick

Gaslightruns through October 26 at the Portland Stage Company. Call 774-0465.

There's something of a contemporary conceit about villains. We tend to think that their evolution has been like that of tanks or rifles: ever more deadly, ever more perfect. But a villain's power is not measured in destructive yield alone. Especially on stage, brutality often matters less than cruelty. Brutality is what the forgettable foes of Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson offer in such happy quantity. Cruelty is Judge Brack's smirk as Hedda Gabler perceives his web of blackmail, or the Marquis' laugh at the close of Marat/Sade, when he has finally goaded the lunatics to riot, in a blasphemous parody of the French revolution. Brutality wields a club, cruelty a sham innocence. But both can kill.

I betray no stage secrets by noting that Gaslight is the cruel tale of an Englishwoman slowly pushed to the brink of madness by her depraved husband. The Portland Stage Company reveals as much in their promotionals, and they are wise to do so. For despite all the trappings of a "murder mystery," Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play withholds neither the identity nor the nature of its villain for long -- not from the audience, that is. The suspense (and it's considerable) has nothing to do with such traditional "whodunit" questions, and everything to do with how and when he'll do it next.

Anita Stewart's exquisite set may be gas-lit, but the signs of villainy are brightest neon. Anxious, awkward Bella (Marissa Copeland), five years married, flits down a grand staircase into a lavish Victorian parlor -- vaulted ceilings, gigantic paintings, thickets of potted palms -- a room that dwarfs its owners and their dainty furnishings. On one of these, a green settee, sprawls the man to which Bella's eyes snap about every four seconds. Jack Manningham (Tom Ford) is a gentleman down to his trim beard and his watch and fob, but his wife's movements are those of a child trying to steal candy from an ogre. When he wakes she all but leaps out of her skin, although she's guilty of no more than laying out biscuits for tea.

Before a word's spoken, then, we know that the power is all in Jack's hands. His first actions only drive the point home. Manipulative from the first, he bullies his fragile wife into a pointless confrontation with a young servant (Sally Wood as the mutinous Nancy), then justifies it as his way of looking out for Bella's interests. But when it comes to playing his wife's nerves, Jack knows more tunes than an Irish balladeer. In 10 minutes he leads her through transports of joy ("because you have stayed in and been kind to me!" she exclaims) to hysterical wails of despair. Bella, it seems, is losing her memory and her mind -- how else to explain the conversations he recalls and she does not? How else do objects vanish from around the house, only to appear in her sewing-box? When Bella swears her innocence by kissing a bible, he merely raises the stakes: "Then you really are mad! You unhappy wretch, you're stark jibbering mad like your wretched mother before you!" With those words, and a reminder of his readiness to see her locked up, he is off for a night on the town.

Now, Cruise and Gibson, facing such indirect savagery, wouldn't have a clue how to aid poor Bella -- least of all in 1880s England, when a woman needed the most incontrovertible proof of a husband's wickedness to flee the household. Fortunately the man on the scene is better equipped. As Sergeant Rough, Aled Davies may be trying to get some of the goodness out of his system in advance of A Christmas Carol season (he has twice played Scrooge with PSC). Certainly, Rough is any wife-driven-mad-by-madman's dream come true. Watching Davies is like seeing Jack himself in some ethical magic mirror. Where Jack is cold and still, forcing others to dote, Rough ranges the parlor like a bloodhound, sniffing for evidence of Jack's murderous past. Where Jack is stingy, Rough is generous. "I can't have you doubting your reason," he tells Bella, handing her his flask of whiskey. "There -- that will give you faith in your reason like nothing else." Davies's wit and warmth are pitched to just the right hue for a Victorian hero, drawn from reserves of character rather than oiled biceps.

Without Rough's intervention, we may suppose that all would be lost for Bella, whose status as the consummate victim makes her the least interesting of the major characters. Bella's modus operandi is agony and fear -- both so unrelenting that even her laugh is one of helplessness: the laugh of a prisoner at the dungeon's door. Copeland's maintenance of this fever pitch is appropriately painful. But curiously, her great moment of transformation, when the tables are finally turned on scheming Jack, was underplayed at Friday's opening. Gaslight is all about cruelty and power. It's odd to find Bella less powerful in revenge than in torment.

Yet ultimately it is from Jack's wicked nucleus that the drama springs. There is every sign that director Michael Rafkin appreciates this, for he puts Ford through a two-hour triathlon of evil. When Jack enters alone in Scene 3, conducting a faint and melancholy choir, the simmering satisfaction on his face and his self-absorbed capers about the room combine perfectly with the distant music: the effect is sudden insight into his delight in manipulation. He projects benevolence to a degree sufficient for us to believe in Bella's belief. He shows one face to the older servant (Barbara Mather) he cannot corrupt, another to the younger Nancy, who he plans to add to his list of conquests. He threatens, sneers, belittles, returns to faux-benevolence. All of these Jacks are compelling, and the composite fascinates us as only a monster can. The play rises on Ford's dexterous portraiture.

Robert von Stein Redick can be reached at robvsredick@earthlink.net.