For 20 years, attempts have been made to promote Patrick Hamilton as more than a literary also-ran. There have been fanfares around the Penguin Modern Classics reissues of his novels, the TV adaptation of his 1929-34 trilogy 20,000 Streets Under the Sky, the noughties London revivals of his hit plays Gaslight and Rope (respectively better known, tellingly, in screen form as “the Ingrid Bergman film” and “Hitchcock’s one-shot masterpiece”) and Nigel Jones’s 2008 biography. But it has taken a posthumous stint as secret scriptwriter for The Archers to put him back in the headlines.
It is one of his plots rather than Hamilton himself that has made news, however. The Times’s Libby Purves, Mumsnet posters and newspaper letter writers have all pointed in recent weeks to the debt owed to Gaslight by the radio soap’s protracted domestic abuse storyline. This week it sensationally saw Helen Titchener stabbing her obnoxious husband, Rob, providing front-page fodder for the Mail, Times and Telegraph.
Just like the villain in Hamilton’s play (a West End and Broadway triumph, made into both a British film and Bergman’s MGM vehicle), Rob had infantilised his wife and shredded her self-confidence. Before she came to her senses, he had convinced Helen she was unstable, unreliable and imagining things, cutting her off from other people who might insist she was not deluded and realise he was evil.
Also drawing on A Doll’s House (like Ibsen’s Nora, Helen was planning to quit her marriage before being provoked into the knife attack), The Archers’ narrative deftly transposed Hamilton’s tale of psychological torture (in the cruel-to-be kind guise of protecting a fragile, over-sensitive woman) from its setting in late-Victorian London to contemporary Borsetshire. Playing it out over more than two years, it also altered the villain’s motivation - Rob appears to be solely driven by a need for control, over Helen and their children, whereas in Hamilton’s melodrama the husband is a criminal who imprisons his wife in order to keep her unaware of his dark past and his nightly hunt in the house’s upper floors for her dead predecessor’s jewels.
As its setting in 1880 acknowledged, Gaslight revived a gothic trope of the (usually foreign) tyrannical husband that goes back to Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and notably continues in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and, less luridly, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. Together with Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, published just four months before its premiere in December 1938, it prompted and became part of a 40s cinema trend: as well in the Hollywood versions of Rebecca (1940) and Gaslight (1944), a critique of the latter on tcm.com notes that tormented, mismarried young heroines, played respectively by Joan Fontaine, Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor, also figure in Suspicion (1942), Undercurrent (1946) and Conspirator (1949).
It could be that a comparable cluster of fiction is emerging now – Britain’s most-admired original TV drama last year, Doctor Foster, also centred on a wronged wife driven so crazy that she eventually attacked her husband. In the denouement of George Cukor’s Gaslight, Hepburn counter-terrorises Charles Boyer (by then caught by a detective and tied up) by waving a knife in his face, but she doesn’t use it. The Archers, in contrast, reverted at this point from Hamilton to its more customary covert scriptwriter, Thomas Hardy: Helen knifed her husband and rapist, Rob, just as the heroine knifes her lover and rapist, Alec, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and now similarly faces a courtroom ordeal. The great advantage of switching from one authorial template to the other, from Radio 4’s perspective at least, is that it means another year of Rob and Helen misery.
