WATCH: Exploring the life of tragic Gaslight playwright Patrick Hamilton

Hamilton, celebrated author of Rope, Gaslight and Hangover Square, was a fascinating and ultimately sad individual.

“I knew of his work as lots of people do and as certainly most actors do. People will have heard of Rope and Gaslight but one of his novels was dramatised and it just sparked my curiosity and I read a wonderful biography of him. For me there was so much that interested me. I was personally very interested in the way that he is quite an early example of someone that has had massive success very early and has then struggled to cope with it. We are now quite familiar with that phenomenon of how early success can really wreck your life but really it just fascinated me that he was someone who had everything and then lost it all and was dead by the age of 58. He became an alcoholic like most of his family and at the end of his life he was drinking three bottles of whisky day. J B Priestley knew and admired him and he said ‘Patrick Hamilton needs whisky like a car needs petrol.’ But what also drew me was the wit of the man and the fact that in his writing in so many ways he has a huge sympathy for the outsider, for the lost and for the lonely. He was not a stereotypical drunken self-absorbed author. Far from it. He was someone who had great insight.”

Part of his tragedy was that he suffered trauma very early on: “When he was at the height of his early success, when he was 28, when he had had a huge hit with Rope in the West End and on Broadway and he was getting critical acclaim as well as a novelist, he was hit by a drunk driver in 1932. That was an era when people just fell into a car drunk and Hamilton was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was quite badly disfigured by it and I think the psychological shock was just as great. It affected his world view. I don't think he ever saw the world in quite the same way again.”

From early life in Chiswick to a tragic demise, his story challenges audiences with wit and daring, Mark promises.

“It's the first show that I made and I made it 11 years ago. I went up to Edinburgh with it and then I started touring. I thought it would go on for six to eight months, the usual touring thing, the usual model, but it has just carried on and on. I think the show at The Grove will be the 100th performance. It is certainly around the number. I have done three other shows and I perform all four of them in constant tandem. It means that I don't have to have a window where I can do four or five nights a week with one show. I prefer to do them all sporadically.”

Hamilton’s stage plays included Rope (1929); The Procurator of Judea (1930; unpublished); John Brown's Body (1931; unpublished); and Gas Light (1938).