Vertigo Theatre’s current production, The Woman in Black, is a deliciously atmospheric, old-fashioned sort of play. I mean, how often, these days, do you have the chance to see a true ghost story onstage? Perhaps even more than the story, what engaged me is the wonderfully haunting atmosphere director Kelly Reay and the design team have created onstage.
The Woman in Black began as a novel by British author Susan Hill. (Incidentally, Hill also wrote a sequel to the Daphne du Maurier classic, Rebecca, titled Mrs. de Winter). Stephen Mallatratt adapted the work into a successful play; The Woman in Black has been running in London’s West End for 20 years.
Set in Victorian England, the play opens with lawyer Mr. Kipps (Kevin Rothery) standing in a theatre, rehearsing the telling of his personal tale of terror in an attempt to exorcise the event from his life. He has hired a young actor (Christian Goutsis) to help him. In effect, the opening portion of the play echoes an Acting 101 class, with the actor imploring a frustrated Kipps to think of the well-being of his audience and, as such, coaching him in manners of delivery. Kipps gives up and asks the actor to re-tell his story. Kipps portrays all the other, ancillary characters. This play-within-a-play is carried out using few props — primarily, a couple of trunks onstage — providing another opportunity for a commentary on acting, namely the role imagination plays in theatre.
The play within a play recounts the tale of a young Kipps travelling to a remote part of England to settle the affairs of a deceased widow, Mrs. Drablow. Despite the obvious fear of the locals surrounding Mrs. Drablow’s Eel Marsh House, Kipps goes there anyway to sort through her papers and is soon terrorized by sightings of a ghostly woman in black with a wasted face. He discovers the spectre is anything but harmless and that her malevolence is driven by a desire for revenge — the result of a tragedy involving Mrs. Drablow and a young child. Goutsis does a wonderful job transitioning from a confident young man, unaware of the cares and dangers that await him, to one haunted by the terror he has seen.
The production relies a great deal on the dark and spooky atmosphere created by the lighting and sound design of Terry Gunvordahl and Andrew Blizzard respectively. The sounds of a child’s musical wind-up toy when Kipps stumbles upon an abandoned nursery, or those that evoke the terror mounting in Kipps’s head as he thrashes around on a darkened stage with only a flashlight, searching for a spectre in the shadows, help the audience share in the otherworldly horrors Kipps experiences.
The play is a bit slow in taking off, because of the fairly lengthy opening scene during which Kipps is trying to inject some drama into the reading of his tale. The pace picks up once the re-telling of Kipps’s tale starts and, with a run time of less than two hours (including intermission) the play is over before you know it. I left the theatre wanting more.
The evening I attended, there were a few titters from the audience. I couldn’t tell if they were borne of a sense of unease or because people were having a hard time accepting the ghost-story premise. So, for the record, I’ll say the one caveat to enjoying this show is you have to embrace that it’s a ghost story. And, as with any good scary story, you should just sit back, try to relax and let The Woman in Black chill you to the bone.
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