Review: The Woman in Black at Liverpool Playhouse ****1/2

In a world where technology continues to up the ante when it comes to breathtaking spectacle, it’s heartening to know there’s still a place – and appetite – for (ingeniously) simple storytelling.

And more than 35 years after it was first staged, The Woman in Black still delivers when it comes to generating suspense and genuine moments of surprise without relying on digital trickery.

Instead, it’s a testament to compelling performances, clever lighting, sound and set design, and a judicious use of suggestion and misdirection, coupled with the power of the human imagination and the willing participation/collusion of its audience.

Stephen Mallatratt’s stage adaptation of Susan Hill’s modern gothic supernatural chiller started life as a Christmas offering at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough. And it’s being trailed at the Playhouse, where this latest touring production is in residence until the New Year, as ‘the original Christmas ghost story’.

I suspect a certain C Dickens Esq may have something to say about that. Although technically, in the world of The Woman in Black itself, it’s true in the sense that troubled solicitor Arthur Kipps shies away from a Christmas Eve game of spooky ghost storytelling because his original experience is much more frightening.

Still, December’s cold, dark nights certainly augment the tale’s chilling atmosphere (it’s also quite cold in the Playhouse auditorium so wrap up warmly!).

In Mallatratt’s version – originally commissioned by Robin Herford who has directed it ever since, Kipps (Malcolm James) enlists the assistance of an unnamed actor (Mark Hawkins) to help him tell the shocking story that has haunted him for 30 years, in the hope of exorcising – literally – the ghosts of his past and finally finding some peace.

Above and top: Mark Hawkins (The Actor) and Malcolm James (Arthur Kipps) in The Woman in Black. Photos by Mark Douet.

The actor suggests staging Kipps’ tale, and it becomes a play within the play as the events which took place on northeast England’s bleak, mist-soaked, marshy coast (hints of Great Expectations) slowly unfold, the actor playing the younger Kipps and the older man taking on the supporting roles.

Sent north to the mysterious Eel Marsh House to sort out the affairs of the deceased widow Alice Drablow, Kipps is drawn into an unsettling world of mysterious figures, unexplained events, chilling sounds and a creeping feeling of dread which is as all-pervading as the frets that roll in off the sea…and billow through the Playhouse stalls.

Things go bump, creak, squeak and squeal in the night – and there’s plenty of squeaking and squealing too from an audience which, while of diverse ages (Hill’s The Woman in Black is a GCSE text), is evidently communally invested in the events on stage.

Michael Holt’s set – ostensibly a few (endlessly versatile) props on a sharply raked stage in front of a shabby shroud of backcloth – is as cunningly deceptive as Hill’s story, in large part due to Kevin Sleep’s inventive lighting design which hides and reveals key moments of drama, and a visceral soundscape created by Rod Mead and Sebastian Frost.

James and Hawkins, who have previously appeared in the play’s long run in the West End, both impress in their roles here.

But while the show is billed as a two-hander, there’s also a third – crucial – figure that shouldn’t go unsung. So chapeau to Ishbel Cumming for her part in what is an absorbing and deliciously spine-chilling seasonal alternative to panto.