The Woman in Black, The Lowry, 28th April-2nd May 2015
Harry Potter has a lot to answer for. Or at least I think he does. Because if Harry Potter, or Daniel Radcliffe, hadn’t starred in the film version of The Woman in Black, it might have been a little easier to enjoy this theatrical adaptation at The Lowry. Without the Harry Potter factor, it is unlikely that a crowd of screaming, chattering, teenagers would have turned up in their droves to watch Susan Hill’s 1983 novella bought to the stage. But they did. And their whispers, their loud rustling of chocolate wrappers, their many mobile phones, and their dramatic screams, made this a difficult theatre experience to really relish. Unless you were a teenager, of course. And fair play to them; they seemed to have a whale of a time.
Even with the issues caused by an unruly audience, though, a play of the highest quality would surely have been able to rise above. There were moments when The Woman in Black did. Clever lighting and an extremely creative use of the stage did create a nice, creepy feel at times, and the first few occasions when the ghost emerged were sudden and shocking.
But in the main part, the play seemed to fall short of the story that inspired it. The novella is a classic of the gothic horror genre – it gets under the skin and it keeps the reader tense, intrigued, and on the edge of their seat. The play turns this tension into a kind of comedy. Arthur Kipps (Julian Forsyth) has employed The Actor (Anthony Eden) to help him learn how to read the story of a haunting he lived through in front of an audience. But the actor wants to make it into a performance. A play, in fact. This leads to perhaps twenty minutes of scenes in which the only subject is how Kipps isn’t an actor. The script plays for laughs, sometimes gets them, but anyone who came for a ghost story is still waiting for the fear to kick in.
Then, after the actor decides that he should play Kipps and Kipps should play everyone else is the story (why?) Kipps suddenly becomes a brilliant actor. The laughs go away for a while and the story starts. We see Kipps travel to a small town to look through the papers of Mrs Drablow, a recently deceased woman with a mysterious past. We see the people he meets and sense their reluctance to discuss Drablow’s house or the rumours that surround it. We see Kipps slowly start to uncover a secret, at the same time as a shadowy spectre starts to work its way in to his days. And we see the havoc it wreaks upon his life.
There’s a real story in there; a gripping one. One that haunted readers when it was written down on the page. But on stage, the story, the interesting part, is constantly punctured by interjections from the actors. At first, this is mystifying. Then, when the reasons become clear around halfway through, you have to wonder if it was worth it. The addition of this strange plot device seems to have been made mainly for a kind of punchline at the end. Most people will have picked up on it too early for it to have any real impact. Except maybe the Potter Army.
I was left wondering whether the tension and intrigue may have been more palpable if it wasn’t for the fake screams and the whispers that distracted from the story. In the end, though, I don’t see that it would have made much difference. It seems the play wasn’t aiming for the same things as the novella; the hammy acting, the bizarre comedy elements, and the reluctance to ramp up the anxiety for anything more than a minute, meant that this tale of horror became a farce.
Fran Slater