By Nick Dent
It’s probably a good rule of thumb that if a door in a spooky old house opens by itself, one should not go through it. Also, if gruff locals keep dropping foreboding hints about said house, it might not be the best place to spend the night.
These are some of the lessons of Stephen Mallatratt’s adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel The Woman in Black, theatre’s all-time most successful chiller.
Chill factor: Daniel MacPherson in The Woman in Black.Credit: Justin Nicholas
Last year this macabre tale ended a 33-year run in London – a record for a play only surpassed by Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap (also touring Australia from May).
Local empresario Alex Woodward has mounted a licensed production, which is essentially the same show that startled audiences at the Fortune Theatre in the West End for all those years.
It’s 1951 and the elderly Arthur Kipps (John Waters) is waiting on the stage of an empty theatre for his appointment with an actor he has hired. Kipps has resolved to confess to his loved ones a long-held secret, and he wishes the tale to be told properly – “so I may sleep without nightmares”.
The actor (Daniel MacPherson) arrives – as exuberant and upbeat as Kipps is mousy and reserved. And so their rehearsals begin, the actor taking on the role of Kipps’ younger self and Kipps playing all the other roles.
As a young lawyer, we learn, Kipps travelled to the foggy coastal town of Crythin Gifford to attend the funeral of one Mrs Drablow and to close off her affairs. The deceased was a recluse occupying a lonely grey mansion on an island separated from the mainland by a causeway. Mists routinely roll in to enclose the house and treacherous quicksand surrounds it.
John Waters and Daniel MacPherson play all the characters – except one – in the play.Credit: Justin Nicholas
Despite the veiled warnings of various locals Kipps crosses the causeway and enters the house, where the vision of a woman in black with a pale, wasted face soon begins to do what ghosts do.
Mallatratt, who died before his time in 2004, conceived the play in Hill’s hometown of Scarborough as a cheap Christmas production. His great achievement was to harness the power of audience imagination to generate the goosebumps – what you don’t see always being more scary that what you do.
The production ran in London’s West End for 33 years, only closing in March 2023.Credit: Justin Nicholas
So if The Woman in Black does not surprise or chill the marrow as much as it might have done when it was first staged in 1987, that’s not to its discredit. Something is still freshly unwholesome about it, all these years later.
The veteran Waters, in his second Australian tour of the play, offers a masterclass in character work, pivoting between narrator, coachman, innkeeper, landowner and provincial solicitor. MacPherson, also something of a legend with a career spanning Neighbours to Dancing with the Stars, is equally riveting. It’s quite the treat to spend two hours in the hands of two such charismatic and technically astute stars.
You could look for deeper meanings in The Woman in Black: about misogyny, the pervasive power of grief, and the role of entertainment in exorcising our worst demons. But mostly it exists to put the willies up of audience members and, judging by the gasps on opening night, it achieves that.
The Woman in Black plays at the Playhouse, QPAC until May 11; Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide, May 15-26; His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth, May 30-June 9; the Athenaeum, Melbourne, June 13-July 6; Canberra Theatre Centre, July 9-14; Illawarra Performing Arts Centre, Wollongong, July 17-21; Civic Theatre, Newcastle, July 23-27; and Theatre Royal, Sydney, July 30-August 17.