Award-winning stage and screen actress Tara Fitzgerald is to play Bella Manningham in Northampton Royal and Derngate’s new production of Patrick Hamilton’s classic thriller Gaslight.
Known for regular appearances in television series Waking the Dead and Game of Thrones and for her role in the film Brassed Off, Tara Fitzgerald’s recent theatre credits include leading roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Almeida Theatre and the Donmar Warehouse. Before that she won a New York Drama Desk Award for her role as Ophelia opposite Ralph Fiennes as Hamlet.
The cast of Gaslight also includes Jonathan Firth, last seen as Geoffrey in J B Priestley’s Eden End at Royal and Derngate in 2011, who plays Jack Manningham and Told by an Idiot’s Paul Hunter, who takes the part of the detective.
In Gaslight, Bella Manningham is convinced she is losing her mind as her mother did before her. With her husband away on business, she loses all sense of reality. The surprise arrival of a retired detective leads to a shocking discovery that will shake her respectable Victorian marriage to its core.
The production is directed by Lucy Bailey, whose stagings of Andrew Rattenbury’s adaptation of James M Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice at the Playhouse Theatre in 2005 and the touring version of Frederick Knott’s Dial M For Murder in 2009 were said to have redefined the art of the theatrical thriller. Her other productions include Mike Poulton’s adaptation of Ivan Turgenev’s Fortune’s Fool at the Old Vic and Titus Andronicus at Shakespeare’s Globe, both in 2014.
Design is by William Dudley, whose career has been recognised with seven Olivier Awards. Lighting designer Chris Davey worked with Lucy Bailey on Dial M for Murder, winning a TMA award for best lighting design. Sound design is by Mic Pool, Tony Award winner for the Broadway production of The 39 Steps. Original music is composed by Nell Catchpole.
Gaslight runs at Royal and Derngate from Friday 16 October until Saturday 7 November.
After the matinée performances on 24 and 31 October, Royal and Derngate’s Young Company will perform a selection of short plays from scripts inspired by Gaslight.