It is the perfect title. Gaslight comes and goes, flickers and gutters. Sometimes lurid, sometimes melancholy, it's both a potboiler and a psychological study. This is a play that needs a shrewd and delicate director: it has found him in Peter Gill.
Patrick Hamilton described his 1938 hit drama as pastiche and 'a Victorian thriller'. The plot - in which a villain seeks to persuade his spouse that she's going off her head, but is thwarted by the intervention of a dogged policeman - is stocked with the traditional ingredients of melodrama. It has a wan wife, a city suffused with yellow fog, and an archetypal rotter. Andrew Woodall lets rip with the rotter: he is barrel-chested, mutton-chopped and (the more effortful the elocution, the worse the character) consonant-spitting; he can judge himself an instant success, since he gets booed when he takes his curtain call. The dialogue is often preposterous: everyone suffers from a chronic echolalia worthy of Corrie's late Fred Elliott. 'Are you telling me the truth? Are you telling me the truth?' pleads the anguished spouse. 'Look at me to see if I'm telling you the truth,' responds the cop. 'Don't you see? Don't you see?' the appeal rings out, 'I had it all the time. I had it all the time.' Well, I could go on, I could go on.
Yet along with the heaviness there is real suspense and real subtlety. This is 1890s melodrama filtered through a 1930s voice: the sensibility of Hamilton's neglected novels - finely tuned records of lives spent on the brink - feeds the action, which is dominated not by hullabaloo and horror but by febrile psychological tension. Gill's production cleverly suggests that much of this tension is sexual.
Within minutes, the villain shows himself up, not only by verbally haranguing his wife, but by kicking her trailing gown out of the way of his boots. He is, in fact, just abuse stuffed into a waistcoat: having killed one woman he attempts to degrade and derange his wife, while also lustily pawing the household's (admittedly far from unwilling) young maid. His counterpart, the stalwart policeman, is played by Kenneth Cranham. There's a 21st-century knowingness in this casting - Cranham played the plod who turned everything on its head in Stephen Daldry's reinvention of another vintage play, An Inspector Calls - but it's also hard to imagine anyone doing it better. Cranham is both stolid and salacious: he's called Detective Rough, and there's a bit of a growl when he asks the little wife if he can take off his jacket and display what he calls his 'saucy' shirt.
As the wife, Rosamund Pike looks perfect and virginal: she could have come from a late-Victorian fashion-plate, with her pale skin, immaculate blond coils and blue-grey flounces of fabric. She does everything to indicate distress - hand-fluttering, floor-pacing - without ever quite seeming distraught, but she comes into her own in the part's more surprising moments, as a sharp-witted victim who will take her own sadistic revenge. In this production, the play's central atmospheric notion and murder clue - snitched by Hamilton from a novel by his brother - looks like a sexual hint: as the gas is lit in one room, the light wanes in another, so that the stage is always flushing and fading.
In contrast, The Drowsy Chaperone, another pastiche, is plonking. The show - music and lyrics by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison, book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar - comes from success on Broadway, declaring itself as musical comedy and presenting itself as affectionate send-up: you're bound to like me, unless you're a humourless hard heart, the little thing whimpers. It looks heavy hoofed on the West End stage.
A framing device has a sad sod (he wears a cardigan and his occasional table has a dangly mat) listening obsessively to recordings of an imaginary musical, supposed to have been created in the 1920s, and recorded in the very theatre in which he's speaking. As he dreams, the stage is invaded with the musical's characters. Postmodern? More like prefab.
As the romantic lead, John Partridge whisks around on roller skates with a grin so enormous that it nearly meets around the back of his head: there's the vestige of a good wheeze here as he sings 'I'm an accident waiting to happen'. As there is when his bride-to-be, Summer Strallen, warbles that she 'don't want to show off no more' while wrapping her legs round her ears and doing the splits.
There's a recurrent just-about-good gag about the chaperone being played by a diva lacking in inches who resents her taller co-stars: Elaine Paige, strong in voice, short on charm and bundled up like various sorts of cushion, spends a lot of time pushing her co-star down or jumping on the bed to outstrip her. But the satirical target is vague, the performances over-mugged, the musical numbers undistinguished. One Drowsy Chaperone: one somnolent critic.
