Thrilling stuff

This season’s they-don’t-make-’em-like-that-any-more offering at the Old Vic is Gaslight. The chief reason for going to see it is that it stars the talented young actress Rosamund Pike. Time spent gazing at the astoundingly beautiful Miss Pike is never wasted. But Gaslight has other attractions as an entertainment. It’s a 1938 three-act thriller set in murky Victorian London, with a married couple, servants, horsehair furniture and a nice juicy vein of psychopathic sadism.

Most of us know it from the 1944 film version in which Ingrid Bergman went mildly bonkers and won an Oscar for rolling her eyes. When you read the play, it is startling how unfaithful are the two Gaslight films (an earlier screen version starred Anton Walbrook). The baddies in both are foreigners so they are obviously up to no good (in the Old Vic version the sinister Mr Manningham will be the very English Andrew Woodall) and there is little trace remaining of the play’s author Patrick Hamilton.

Hamilton is a fascinating writer who got rich through two efficient stage thrillers, Rope and Gaslight. He was a Marxist who lived swankily in a set in Albany, had a thing about prostitutes (his father married one) and consumed whisky by the pint, dying of liver failure in 1962 at the age of 58, having written one of the great English novels about drinking, Hangover Square. Hamilton was in a literal sense a piss artist who defined the four stages of inebriation: plain drunk, fighting drunk, blind drunk and dead drunk. His fictional turf was the dreg ends of Earls Court, Soho and Hove — as J.B. Priestley put it, ‘a kind of no-man’s-land of shabby hotels, dingy boarding houses and all those saloon bars where the homeless can meet’.