“Have sympathy for your audience,” Daniel MacPherson says in the opening scene of The Woman in Black and, as far as crowd-pleasing dramaturgical mantras go, it’s not a bad one.
Minutes earlier, his co-star John Waters was alone on the stage reading lines straight out of a book. “It was 9.30 on Christmas Eve …” he mumbles, in a performance that’s dry, monotonous and poorly projected to boot. For a guy who has starred in everything from All Saints to Underbelly, he’s a charisma vacuum on a dull grey stage – right up until a man in the row in front of me starts heckling.
The disruptive punter is the Actor, played by MacPherson (The Bill, Neighbours, Dancing with the Stars) with slicked back hair and a vaguely Victorian outfit. Compared to Waters he’s confident, expressive and perhaps a bit much – an actor, essentially. As he bounds up on to the stage, we learn that he’s been hired by Waters’ character Arthur Kipps to help tell his story – but boy, does Kipps’ co-star have notes.
“It must be told,” Kipps says of his haunting experience but, as the Actor explains, how it’s told is important too. Sympathy for the audience means meeting them halfway – and giving them a reason to stay interested.
Based on Susan Hill’s 1983 novel, this fourth-wall-free opening gives Hill’s knowing exploration of gothic horror tropes a further self-aware twist. The late playwright Stephen Mallatrat nests this ghost story within a ghost story via the Actor’s attempts to convert Kipps to the transformative power of theatre, and deliver his traumatic true story with the suspense it deserves.
This also explains how The Woman in Black was, until recently, a long-running West End staple (it closed in March 2023 after three decades). It’s a sturdy, economical two-and-a-bit-hander, created by Mallatrat and original director Robin Herford as a piece of “cut-price stocking filler” that mines its practical or budgetary restrictions for laughs while priming the audience for the frights ahead. It’s also packed with enough didactic lessons about old-school stagecraft to ensure even the toughest midweek matinee sessions can be padded out with one or two high school drama classes.
The Actor takes on the role of the young Kipps, as they recreate the young solicitor’s account of being sent to the gloomily secluded mansion Eel Marsh House – classic Bram Stoker territory, right down to the mountain of real estate-related paperwork. (Truly the stuff of nightmares!) The reliable trappings of the genre continue: an unexpected overnight stay, a mysteriously locked door, some ominous creaking and a generous dry ice budget to convey the ominous fog that lingers over the marshes.
Waters and MacPherson show their working, explaining how through light, sound, basic props and the combined power of the actors’ and audience’s imagination the theatre can become a happy, shared delusion. As the older Kipps portrays the various supporting characters his younger self meets along the way, even he becomes possessed by the theatre bug – which mercifully allows Waters to stop acting like he can’t act.
When the play finally does make its stop-start pivot from winking comedy to spook-fest it arrives without subtlety, courtesy of some very loud jump scares that punctuate periods of extended silence – which mainly draw attention to how creaky the seats in the Dunstan Playhouse can be.
It’s a world away from some of more buzzy meta-adaptations of gothic classics currently storming the West End but, for all the heavy-handed shocks, the simple image of an empty rocking chair, and MacPherson walking around a darkened stage casting shadows with his fingertips, are playfully spooky. It’s effective enough for one audience member near me to exclaim variations of “Jesus Christ!” on at least two occasions, and I also confess to being more invested in a certain imaginary dog than I expected to be. But then again, I once audibly gasped while watching The Secret Life of Pets.
The play’s longevity, widely trumpeted in marketing, might make some assume it’s as old as its quasi-Victorian setting, rather than a workmanlike late-80s retooling of an early-80s tribute to some already well-worn ghost story cliches. As the play unfolds, the set design and staging reveal themselves to have a little more depth and a little more style than that dull grey stage initially suggested but, even as the heavily signposted final twist draws nearer, we’re never quite left in the dark.
For all the promise of terror, the result is an entertaining but ultimately safe night at the theatre that sympathetically leaves its audience in the middle of the road – even if it is a dark and foggy one.
The Woman in Black is on at the Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide, until 26 May, then His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth, 30 May-9 June; Athenaeum Theatre, Melbourne, 13 June-6 July; Canberra Theatre Centre, 9-14 July; Merrigong Theatre Company, Wollongong, 17-21 July; Civic Theatre, Newcastle, 23-27 July; and Theatre Royal, Sydney, 30 July-18 August.
