Kara Tointon is to play Bella Manningham in a new tour of Patrick Hamilton’s thriller Gaslight which starts at Birmingham’s New Alexandra Theatre.
She will team up with Keith Allen who plays Detective Rough and Rupert Young, best known for portraying Sir Leon in the BBC drama series Merlin, who takes the role of Bella’s husband Jack.
Kara Tointon’s roles include Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw at the Garrick Theatre in 2011, Evelyn in Alan Ayckbourn’s Absent Friends at the Harold Pinter Theatre in 2012 and Sheila in Relatively Speaking by the same author at Richmond Theatre, also in 2012.
Keith Allen played Sam in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming at Trafalgar Studios in 2016 and Bert Challoner, a cockney comedian turned talent spotter, in Trevor Griffiths’s Comedians at the Lyric, Hammersmith in 2009. Rupert Young played C K Dexter Haven in Cole Porter’s High Society at the Old Vic in 2015.
Gaslight features Bella Manningham who is at home alone each evening while husband Jack is out on the town. She cannot explain the disappearance of familiar objects nor the ghostly flickering of the living room gaslight. The surprise arrival of retired Detective Rough leads to a shocking discovery that will shake her respectable Victorian marriage to its core.
Anthony Banks directs Gaslight which opens at the New Alexandra Theatre on Friday 6 January and runs until Saturday 14 January. It then tours to Aylesbury Waterside Theatre, New Victoria Theatre in Woking, Grand Opera House in York, Theatre Royal Brighton, Arts Theatre in Cambridge, Lyceum Theatre in Sheffield, Richmond Theatre and New Theatre, Cardiff.