Heard of ‘gaslighting’? Know where it comes from? It’s from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, Gas Light, later adapted for two films (one British, one US), hugely successful in both countries.  His popular novels (e.g. Hangover Square, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, The Gorse Trilogy) include The Slaves of Solitude. Simon Roberts (leading Questors actor and director and passionate Hamilton enthusiast) has now adapted the novel for the stage - and this will be the World Première. (Questors audiences may remember Simon’s striking production of Rope in 2014. Hitchcock directed the film.) 

In 1943 an ill-assorted group of lodgers in a boarding house a few miles outside London are eking out a wartime existence in safety (they hope) from the trauma of the Blitz. The are joined unexpectedly by two wayward and pleasure-seeking GIs and an attractive German-born lady, who divides opinion. At the centre of the plot is Miss Enid Roach, approaching middle-age and rootless. Hamilton cleverly links the vastness of devastating world events with the pared-back lives of the residents thrown against their will into a different form of strife. 

You’d expect some darkness from the author of Gas Light – but this is a black comedy weaved around a group of random strangers forced into proximity in the middle of the black-out.