Finding new ways to make you jump
I caught The Woman in Black at the Liverpool Playhouse on Tuesday 24 February, and it turns out a decades-old ghost story can still make a whole room scream. This touring production leans into simplicity- using light, sound and clever staging to turn a quite bare stage into something quietly, and then not-so-quietly, unnerving.
If you don’t know it, the play (adapted by Stephen Mallatratt from Susan Hill’s novel) is framed as a piece of theatre being made in front of us. An older Arthur Kipps hires a young actor to help him finally tell (and hopefully lay to rest) the events that traumatised him years prior. As they rehearse his trip to the isolated Eel Marsh House, the neat lines between “now” and “then” start to blur, and the performance itself becomes part of the haunting.
It’s a clever device that gives the show room for both humour and horror. At the start, there’s a lovely, self-aware playfulness in the way the pair complain about projection, pacing and performance style, all under the illusion that they’re performing to an empty theatre.
The production moved clearly between present and past with very little fuss. A shift in lighting (a warmer tone) is often all it took to tell us we’d left the rehearsal room and stepped into Kipps’ memories. That clarity makes the storytelling feel clean, and it lets the audience do a lot of imaginative work filling in the marshes, and long corridors of Eel Marsh House.
The performances are key to making this work, and the cast rise to the challenge. Older Arthur Kipps’ actor is especially impressive, constantly switching between his central role and a string of supporting characters with nothing more than changes in demeanour, accent and physicality. One moment he’s a haunted solicitor, the next he’s an office official or a wary villager, and each shift is so cleanly drawn that you never feel lost about who you’re watching. That precision gives the production much of its texture, and quietly underpins the play’s “storytelling-in-a-theatre” conceit.
The jump scares are, frankly, very effective. I flinched at least six times, which is a decent hit rate for a show that’s been around long enough to be on school syllabuses (there was a GCSE school trip sat next to me actually). The production doesn’t bombard you with constant shocks; instead, it spaces them out, letting tension simmer before breaking it with a scream, a slam or a figure appearing just where you don’t want it to.
One of the evening’s nice surprises is the way the actors use the entire space. They don’t stay politely on stage; they come down the aisles, they appear in unexpected corners, and at times they’re even seated among the audience. That choice instantly makes the story feel closer and more alive as it’s happening in and around you.
The audience around me responded really well. Early on, there were laughs from the rows as the characters played up the idea that no one was watching them. Later, those same people were screaming at the darker moments.
This Playhouse run of The Woman in Black trusts in atmosphere, timing and the audience’s imagination. The clear lighting shifts between past and present, the bold use of the whole auditorium and a handful of genuinely well-timed scares combine into a confidently old-fashioned ghost story that still knows how to get under your skin. If you like your horror built on suggestion rather than gore, and you enjoy the shared thrill of a whole audience jumping together, then it’s well worth a trip into the dark.
The Woman in Black is showing at Liverpool’s Playhouse until February 28th.