A contemporary review of the London performance offers the following synopsis:
'The rich shipowner's widow is a good hater, and Miss Diana Wynyard, a fashionable portrait painter's study in black, presents her various hates with measure and tact, enveloping them all in her own personal stillness and beauty. She has hated her husband, and she and a calmly murderous doctor with Mr. Hugh Williams's charming fireside manner have hastened his end. She hates her former lover, Mr. Ronald Squire imperially disguised and unusually solemn under the compulsion to utter more cautious threats than soft insincerities. She hates her step-daughter, a pleasant girl pleasantly played by Miss Ann Leon. It is a wonder that the step-daughter is alive at the end, for what the widow hates the doctor cold-bloodedly destroys. They are driven by hate and fear to go on destroying until, except for the step-daughter and a few minor characters, they have no one left but themselves to destroy.'
'Piccadilly Theatre. "Portrait in Black",' The Times, 31 May 1946, p.6.