THE WOMAN IN BLACK | STAGE REVIEW
The New Theatre, Cardiff, Tues 5 May
I had plenty of warnings that the Woman In Black was crap-you-pants terrifying. My partner had seen it on the West End, my friend had seen it on tour and apparently me seeing the Daniel Radcliff movie wouldn’t be enough to prepare me for it – especially since I’m a pretty big wuss. Going into with theatre with all these expectations I was quite surprised, however, when I witnessed not the scream-fest that I had been promised but a cleaver, funny and quite touching production.
As the show begins a man enters the stage. Staring at a note-book he begins to mumbling his way through a paragraph, before he is interrupted by a loud and charismatic actor (Matt Connor) who promptly informs the man (Arthur Kipps – played superbly by Malcom James) that he’ll need learn the art of theatre if he wants to tell his friends and family the story he has written on the pages in front of him. With a thespian’s enthusiasm and flamboyance the actor encourages Kipps to embrace the art of entertainment.
But Mr Kipps hasn’t consulted this man to teach him to entertain, or to bring in an audience. He is a deeply disturbed man who wants to tell the dark story of his past, the story of how he met the woman in black.
The show shifts gears and we are entered into a play-within-a-play and ‘the actor’ (we never find out his name) become Mr Kipp’s younger self – a cheery, ambitious lawyer – while the older Kipps embodies all odd-body characters that the young Kipps encounters.
Young Kipps’ rambling boss sends him on an assignment, to deal with the affairs of a deceased elderly client who lived in Eel Marsh House – a grand but isolated property found on the outskirts of an already remote village.
When Kipps arrives at the village he soon realises any mention of the client or her house makes conversations stop dead and turns villagers cold. He is taken to the house, which is only reachable when the tide is out (making him stranded there when it’s in – it makes me shudder just thinking about it), and gets to work. Things start to get creepy, however, with sudden noises, mysterious figures and all sorts of haunting happenings.
Though the show was no doubt scary (I saw quite a few audience members clinging onto each other throughout the night, myself included) what I actually I ended up liking about The Woman In Black wasn’t what drew me to the show in the first place. It wasn’t the tense horror, or the ghostly shocks but the humour and sensitivity shown by the shows two characters.
I’m still impressed by Malcom James’ performance as the older Kipps, a man tortured by his deeply sad past who is trying his best to exorcise his demons, and even as he embodied other characters I couldn’t help thinking how the elder Kipps would be feeling seeing his horrific history playing out before him. He was a character I was deeply invested in throughout.
Another reason I think I liked the non-horror part of the production was the fact that I didn’t find the show quite as terrifying as I had been led to believe it should be. The woman in black was most chilling when she didn’t move, when she was little more than a shadow and you weren’t even sure if you had seen her or not, so it felt very jarring on the one or two occasions when she jumped out and ran onto the stage. Though this was clearly to give the audience a jump (which, usually, it did) it felt like a bit of a cheap one. After the initial shock subsided the woman suddenly became robbed of her chilling dignity and she then reminded me more of a masked Scooby doo villain than a tortured spirit.
Overall it was a good production; the staging and lighting was cleverly utilised (and almost exactly the same as the West End version, according to my partner), the performances strong and the script tight. If you haven’t seen the show before, and fancy a bit of a scare, it’s a great way to spend the evening. Just don’t have nightmares.
words HEATHER ARNOLD
New Theatre, Cardiff, until Sat 9 May. Tickets: £8.50-£26. Info: www.newtheatrecardiff.co.uk
