Patrick Hamilton's tautly constructed Victorian thriller, later filmed as "Gaslight," unfolds almost entirely within the shadowy, gas-lit drawing room of the Manninghams' London townhouse, where the outwardly devoted husband Jack Manningham is in fact systematically and deliberately driving his wife Bella toward madness. Through a campaign of manipulated objects, denied conversations, and calculated cruelty, dressed up as loving concern, Jack convinces Bella that she is losing her memory and her mind, isolating her from servants and visitors alike so that no one will believe her increasingly frantic protests. His true motive, hidden upstairs behind a locked door, is to search undisturbed for jewels once belonging to a woman he murdered years earlier in the very house, a secret Bella's growing suspicion threatens to expose. Salvation arrives in the form of a retired police detective, Rough, who begins to piece together the truth and helps Bella recognize that her supposed insanity is in fact evidence of her husband's guilt. The play's slow-building dread and its portrait of psychological abuse disguised as devotion were so effective that "gaslighting" entered the language as a term for exactly this kind of manipulation.

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