The production of Gaslight at the "Intimate" and on the subsequent short tour proves two things—that Patrick Hamilton's pre-war play of suspense still has life left in it (and incidentally would have been a better choice to inaugurate the ill-fated "Fortune" venture than Ladies In Retirement) and that Mary Holland, for so many years limited to extolling the virtues of Oxo on television, is an actress with the ability to move one to tears. She has the role of Mrs. Manningham, the impressionable, emotionally immature and pitiably lacking-in-confidence wife of a man who is doing his best to drive her out of her mind while he searches the room at the top of the gloomy Victorian house for the jewels for which he murdered an old woman 20 years before.  In its way Gaslight led the fashion for the psychological thriller in which the attention is transferred from the crime, the secret of which is unfurled as we go along, to the character on whom it has the most effect.  Hamilton, and Mary Holland, show a mind being systematically squeezed and then coming back to life when hope is renewed, with extraordinary skill, and the author also contrives to summon up the dark underside of the Victorian age, when nameless vice thrived in the swirling yellow fog.

Tony Adams is Mr. Manningham, suave and cruel, carrying out his curiously circumlocutory search with elegant relish, smiling at his own cleverness, making love to the pert maid Nancy (Susan Shepherd) while his wife lies terrified in the room upstairs. There is an excellent study of the avuncular detective Rough, whose very deliberation adds to the suspense, by David Garth, and Paddy Frost also fits very neatly into Keith Taylor’s production as the elder servant Elizabeth, letting her sympathy shine through her own fear.  Harry Banks is responsible for the fine setting.