The Gaslight Playhouse · Autumn Season
The Lamplighter's Daughtera play in three acts
Every evening for forty years, Elias Thorne has walked the length of Merrow Street with a ladder and a flame. Tonight the city switches to electric light, and his daughter must decide whether to follow him up the ladder one last time.
Dramatis Personae
- Elias Thorne, the lamplighterOsric Vane
- Wren Thorne, his daughterImogen Hale
- Mr. Calloway, of the Electric CompanyDesmond Ashby
- Mrs. Pell, who keeps the corner shopMarguerite Lyle
- The Night WatchmanTeodor Brask
- A MothPip Merriweather
Order of Scenes
The last ladder, the first wire. A letter arrives that no one wants to open.
Wren climbs alone. Somewhere below, the switches are being thrown one by one.
Every wick in the city remembers who lit it. One of them refuses to go out.
From the Director
We built this production around a single moving light. Our lamplighter carries his flame from post to post, and the audience sees only what he chooses to illuminate. Everything else waits in the dark, which is where theatre has always kept its best secrets. As you move through this programme, you are holding the lamp. Look closely at what it finds, and notice what it leaves behind. The running time is two hours and ten minutes with one interval. Latecomers will be shown to their seats at a suitable pause, guided, appropriately, by torchlight.
Henrietta Quill, Artistic Director