Actor Kate Fitzpatrick: There's something special about Gaslight

While she is not the leading character of the production, it's fitting an actor of such reputation and professional depth is part of the cast.

Starring Geraldine Hakewill, star of Ms Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries, Toby Schmitz from Boy Swallows Universe, Fitzpatrick, and newcomer Courtney Cavallaro, the latest version of this psychological thriller is proving to be a play for our time.

Patrick Hamilton's original 1938 play introduced the world to the powerful term now used universally to describe an insidious form of deception and manipulation, with women so often the victims of this behaviour.

The play, produced by Rodney Rigby's Newtheatricals, the same company that brought Come From Away to the Civic Theatre, is directed by Queensland Theatre's artistic director Lee Lewis.

The 1944 film of Gaslight starred a young Angela Lansbury and Ingrid Bergman who won an Academy Award for her performance. Angel Street, as it was known on Broadway, was also a massive hit and remains one of the longest-running non-musicals in Broadway history with 1295 performances.

The storyline of Gaslight: Young, trusting, and fragile - Bella Manningham thinks she's losing her mind. In the evenings, she hears strange noises. The sitting-room gas lamps dim for no apparent reason. Is Bella's loving relationship with her partner Jack all that it seems?

Fitzpatrick, age 76, takes the role of the housemaid in the play.

"I never played a housekeeper, I've played almost everything else, including a man [Don in Don Juan], Fitzpatrick says. "But never a housekeeper. Our wonderful director Lee Lewis had to teach me how to dust properly. it was a disgrace my attempt at dusting, I had to be shown."

A review in Scenestr from the production's run in Melbourne at the Comedy Theatre during March said FItzpatrick's "quips and passive aggressive commentary throughout Gaslight are fantastic".

"It's is a good feeling, especially when you consider how brilliant Geraldine and Toby are," Fitzpatrick says. " To be even put in the same stratosphere as them is fabulous. I'm thrilled.

"It's a great part, it seriously is.

"It's not just a housekeeper, in that she has a lot of problems of her own, and she has a lot of things to do within the play that helps further the understanding of the plot. And she's got her own little problems to solve, and she helps solve some of the others as well."

Fitzpatrick, humbled to be invited as part of the cast by Rodney Rigby, has played several leading roles in her career in film, stage, and television. Last year she had her first role in film in 15 years, working on Renny Harlin's thriller Deep Water in New Zealand (set for release this year).

With that background, she's still been surprised and impressed with the live audience reaction Gaslight has been drawing.

"The thing that is great, within the first minute we can almost tell what the audience is like," she says. "Certainly after the first four or five minutes, once Toby comes on.

"I can kind of feel them... it gives you this terrific feeling, 'Oh, this is going to be fun tonight, I'm going to enjoy it'.

"It is unusual. With this play, there is something about it, maybe because it's in the form of an old-fashioned play, even though it is a contemporary version. But the setting and costumes, I think it draws the audience into to a degree, because they do call out, suggest things to Bella that she should be doing."

The result of that reaction is that it lifts the actors on stage.

"It's such a rewarding play in that you can become totally engrossed in what you are doing, but you feel the audience are with you," Fitzpatrick says. "They want you to entertain them. instead of sitting back and saying, 'come on and impress me'. They are with us from the start of it. I've rarely experienced that."

Fitzpatrick readily admits she's been subject to gaslighting in her own career. "Without any doubt at all," she says. "It's was quite confronting and shocking."

"It's not just gaslighting, it's lying," she says of the rumours and stories told about her.