Am I the last person in the country to have seen The Woman in Black? Over the past thirty-five years, it has certainly been a phenomenon, and the legions of notebook-wielding teens in attendance the night I finally caught up with everyone else suggest it will be a shared experience for generations of theatre-goers.
As such, despite never having seen it before, I felt generally familiar with the beats of the story, and the metatheatrical gambit which frames the ghostly tale. An older man, Mr Kipps (Malcolm James), has lived through some sort of supernatural experience and wishes to recount the story, to exorcise it by reading it out in front of a select audience of friends and family. He has enlisted a nameless actor (Mark Hawkins) to help coach him through the (almost equally traumatising) experience of the performance.
There are some gentle laughs to be had early on with Kipps’s stumbling attempts to imbue his story with the passion and interest the actor guides him towards. But the joke wears thin quickly, and it’s only once Kipps begins taking on other roles in earnest that the show takes flight.
One of the biggest surprises for me in finally watching the production was just how much it plays on the metatheatrical even beyond that initial setup—how the show lays bare its own workings as it goes. We’re told about the power of sound effects in concert with the audience’s imagination; how a wicker basket might easily become a pony and trap in our mind’s eye.
It is a canny set-up, indicative of the play’s roots as a bare-bones Christmas entertainment in the bar of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough. But it works just as well in the ornate setting of the Grand Opera House, and disarms its audiences for when eerie happenings begin to manifest themselves.
The story is a well-wrought Gothic horror tale, ripe with curses, speedily descending mists, an isolated country house and taciturn locals (all of whom are portrayed with great skill and variety by James). As the actor gets drawn into the fiction, Hawkins’s ability to switch from the clipped ease of the 1950s impresario to a fully-embodied sense of dread pays dividends. As announced by the show itself, the sound (by Sebastian Frost) does much of the atmospheric work, notwithstanding the effective trickery of Michael Holt’s set, perfectly combining with Kevin Sleep’s pinpoint accurate lighting design. The settings conjured aren’t just those of London and Crythin Gifford, but also the theatre world of the 1950s.
Perhaps the framing device helps insure the show against the risks of slipping into parody. There are a couple of moments where the timing feels off—where sequences of supposedly mounting dread feel strangely empty or off the beat, rather than pregnant with foreboding. But on the whole, this is a slick entertainment, a story well told, and that most difficult feats to pull off: a theatrical ghost story with real chills.