West End hit Woman in Black promises to terrify its audience. Laura Davis meets one half of its cast
IT MAY surprise those watching the creepy story unravelling around Eel Marsh House, in the centre of the bleak saltmarshes of early 20th-century England, that the tale was invented long after it is set.
So far afterwards, in fact, that its author would have taken electric lighting for granted and probably had a microwave and a colour television.
Yet the world that the soul of Alice Drablow has just vacated – causing young solicitor Arthur Kipps to travel there from London – is lit by gas lamps and shrouded in mist.
He arrives in time for her funeral, the apparently straightforward task of sorting out her papers chased from his mind when he glimpses a young woman with a wasted face, dressed all in black, at the back of the church.
Published as a novel in 1983, Susan Black’s thriller was adapted as a stage show by Stephen Mallatratt, premiering in Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre- In-The-Round in 1987, and opening at the Fortune Theatre, in the West End in 1989, where it has been ever since.
The touring production, which comes to the Liverpool Playhouse next week, stars Robert Demeger as the older Kipps, remembering his past, and Peter Bramhill (Oswald in the Everyman’s 2008 production of King Lear) as the younger.
“One of the reasons why it’s lasted is the way the story’s told,” says Demeger, who first played the role in 1997 and is on his fifth run of the show.
“There are only two of us in the cast and we’re on stage with just a few chairs and a few costumes.
“It’s a pretty unique play, really – it’s a piece of popular theatre that’s not a musical and they’re quite rare.
“There are very few plays with two people in it that can fill up theatres if the two actors in it are not from Hollyoaks or EastEnders.”
Its limited staging is one of the show’s strengths, he adds. “Quite frankly, it wouldn’t have lasted if it had been done another way. If you had 10 actors and complicated sets, no-one could have afforded to put it on.
“It’s a relatively cheap show to mount but it’s one of those instances of cheapness being a plus because it makes you be more creative.
“It’s very much like the way we used to play as children where you sit on a chair one way round and you’re riding a horse and you turn it round and you’re sitting in an office and you put a hat on and you become somebody else.”
The play opens in the late-1940s when Kipps, now an older man, has spent 30 years being haunted by events surrounding Eel Marsh House.
