Every night in fog-bound 1880s London, Bella Manningham's husband Jack mysteriously disappears, the gaslight in their house dims, and she hears strange noises in the locked room above, Is Bella going insane, as her mother did? Why is her husband behaving so oddly? And who is the stranger named Rough who calls on her?

The titles of some literary works become a part of the language. Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is an obvious one. And Patrick Hamilton's Gaslight is another: old-fashioned the reference may be, but to "gaslight" someone still means to mentally abuse them by perverting or falsely offering information to make them distrust their own memory, perception and sanity.

And that's what happens in Hamilton's 1938 play, which Canberra Repertory Society last produced back in 1946. It's being revived by Rep in a production directed by barb barnett. It's her second directorial assignment with the company after Equus last year. She's interested in why someone would undertake this particularly cruel and insidious form of manipulation.

Gaslight is set in London in the 1880s. Twenty years before the action of the play a murder was committed in a house but the killer was never found. That house is where Bella (played by Kate Blackhurst) and Jack (Peter Holland) now live.

Barnett acknowledges that thrillers and society have changed a lot since Gaslight was first produced but says mental abuse of the kind it depicts still occurs.

While Holland has done quite a lot of comedy roles in recent years she says he is performing well as the mysterious Jack.

"The audience is seeing him partly through Bella's eyes. They've got to believe he is likeable and charming on the one hand, only to discover that he's more than he seems."

And Blackhurst, she says, is dealing with a particular challenge.

"Bella is very difficult to play - she's a character who can seem quite two-dimensional."

And as for the mysterious Rough (Patrick Gallagher) - both Bella and the audience have to find out just who he is and what to make of him. And is the maid (Natalie Waldron) somehow involved in what's happening?

Barnett says she and the cast are digging deep into the play, "trying to find something a little more grounded, a little more depth to it" - thinking about the relationships of the characters and their backstories, for example, to try to flesh them out and make them more than stock figures in a melodrama.

Hamilton (1904-1962) was a novelist and playwright who had an early success with the stage thriller Rope (1929), which was adapted into a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Gaslight was filmed twice - once in Britain, once in the US, the latter providing an Oscar-winning role for Ingrid Bergman - and he also won acclaim for his novel Hangover Square (1941). In recent years his work has been receiving new attention. His life played out like something from a story he might have written: in 1932 he was run over in a car accident which left him severely disfigured. He descended into depression and alcoholism in his later years and died relatively young.