Woman In Black Theme

Stephen Mallatratt's adaptation remains true to the story of the novel and used most of the same words but added a new twist to send chills down the spine of the audience. The play finds an older Arthur Kipps employing an actor to recreate the story in an attempt to excise his demons.

This London production is filled with themes such as isolation and suspense created first by the novel and then exaggerated by Stephen Mallatratt's adaptation. When writing the novel Susan Hill employed all the themes from the Victorian ghost stories she had grown up loving where the traditional haunted elements such as lonely churchyards and old isolated houses are used in abundance. The Woman in Black is set in the equally foreboding, isolated Drablow house complete with it's sinisterly preserved nursery on the top floor.

The suspense in The Woman in Black was born out of Hill's desire to create a real ghost, something that could plausibly exist rather than a werewolf or vampire or the shock tactics that are piled upon each other in horror novels. By introducing the supernatural of the mysterious Woman in Black into the normal life of Arthur Kipps, Susan Hill creates added suspense by suggesting that such a series of events could happen to anybody, including the reader. This element is carried into the stage play with tremendous effect with Mallatratts minimal approach.

Staging the play in a dark, empty Victorian theatre forces the audience to use their imaginations and create something far more chilling than a production full of props, actors, buckets of blood and gore ever could. The darkness in the play is genuine and re-creates the isolation of the novel perfectly. The added twist of two committed actors recreating the events in a story-within-a-story framework adds even more suspense and anticipation while the final revelation about the Woman in Black blurs the edges of reality and the supernatural.

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