The Woman In Black On Film

You might have heard about The Woman In Black because it was recently turned into a film. It featured Daniel Radcliffe, aka Harry Potter and Ciaran Hinds. It has more than two actors and some seriously gorgeous scenery. It got a Rotten Tomato score of 66% and did moderately well at the box office. It's got its flaws (I'm not a fan of the movie ending) but it's a wonderfully atmospheric film. To get a feel for it, watch the trailer below.

I read recently that there's actually a sequel in the works. It's called The Woman In Black: Angel of Death and it's slated for release in 2015. It takes place at Eel Marsh House during World War II - some Londoners end up at the old house to escape the Blitz and run into the home of The Woman In Black. The first trailer was just released. 

Did you see the movie? What did you think? Will you check out the sequel? 

Ghost Lights and Haunted Theatres

Working on some surrounding material for The Woman In Black got me to thinking about how it's kind of funny that a theatre is performing a ghost story, as theatre folk are notoriously superstitious. Like most things, a lot of the superstition is rooted in practical sense. For example, many theaters have what's called a "ghost light." It's basically a bare light bulb on a pole that's left out on stage. The story is that it's supposed to keep ghosts away - I guess ghosts don't like light? The truth is, it's more likely that it started as a safety measure - when you enter a dark theatre, it's pretty darn dark, and in a traditional theatre there's often an orchestra pit so you do run the risk of falling off the edge and breaking your neck.

The Dragon Theatre ghost light in action

All good theaters have a resident ghost or spooky story. There's an old theater in London that has two seats in the balcony bolted down in the open position so that the resident ghosts have permanent seating. Which brings me to my personal theatre ghost story. Years ago when I was in college I worked at a theatre in St. Louis. This was my first summer as a "professional" theatre worker. The theatre was an old church that was built in the late 1800s and had been converted into a theatre.

The Grandel Theatre in St. Louis

I was helping out on the St. Louis Shakespeare production of The Kentucky Cycle, a Pulitzer Prize award winning play by Robert Shenkkan that is actually a play in two parts and spans about 200 years of American history. I was helping the Technical Director (TD) after rehearsal hours to get the set painted and complete so we'd start work at around 10p and would paint till about 2am. One night as we were painting, I mentioned that the wedding dress was really pretty. The TD said "what wedding dress? There's no wedding in the show." And I replied that I'd seen a woman in the upper balcony walking around in a wedding dress while I was up in the balcony working on a prop. The TD laughed and said "oh, you met one of the ghosts then." I rolled my eyes and kept painting and said I didn't believe in ghosts - I figured they were having a bit of fun with the new girl.

I hadn't met the whole cast yet and the next night they were doing a full run so I decided to scope them out to find the prankster in the dress. None of the women in the cast or on the crew remotely resembled the woman in the wedding dress. That evening as they ran the show we noticed a problem with the lights - several of the lights that were supposed to be hitting the front of the stage were aimed too low and were hitting the audience instead of the stage. As I looked up to figure out what row of lights it was, I saw a man up in the front of the balcony, on or near the light pipe where the mis-aligned lights were, so I figured it was a lighting guy working on the lights to re-aim them. At the end of the run during the post-show notes, the lighting came up and I mentioned that I'd seen a guy up there. The Master Electrician and the TD looked at me and said "what guy?" I said "I dunno, some guy in work boots and pants and a plaid kind of shirt was sitting up there on the pipe." And the TD replied "ah, well, you've just seen the other ghost then. He likes to sit up on that front pipe and when he's done, every single light on the pipe has dropped like there was a weight up there that knocked them down." They all proceeded to tell me that the woman in the wedding dress was allegedly killed on her wedding day while heading to the church, and the gentleman was supposedly an old handyman that used to live at the church. They said the ghosts were never malicious, they'd just pop up from time to time walking around and hanging out and doing their thing.

I'm still not sure I believe in ghosts but I know that I walked by a woman in a wedding dress one night at rehearsal.

The Dragon Theatre was a travel agency before we moved in, and then it was abandoned for several years, so I don't think that it's got any tragic stories or ghosts. Now excuse me while I go knock on some wood, go outside, spin in a circle three times, spit, curse, and knock on the theatre door to be let back in just in case I just angered our resident Woman In Black.

Anyone else have a theatrical ghost story to share?

--Kim

Who Is Stephen Mallatratt?

In the mid-1970s, Stephen Mallatratt, while working as an actor in Alan Ayckbourn's company in Scarborough, wrote An Englishman's Home. It was, recalls Ayckbourn, a near-perfect first play. Like his better known peers - John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Ayckbourn himself - Mallatratt's writing was addressed and stamped by his experience as an actor.

Playwright Stephen Mallatratt

Mallatratt, who has died of leukemia aged 57, went on to achieve fame and fortune as the adapting dramatist of Susan Hill's novel The Woman In Black, premiered in Scarborough as a stocking filler over Christmas in 1987.

The Woman In Black, a beautifully wrought, classic thriller for two actors, the successor to Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth, is now the second longest-running West End play - after The Mousetrap. It has been translated into a dozen languages and produced in 40 countries.

Although never a "brand-name" playwright, Mallatratt's craft and professionalism made him well-known as a core member of the Coronation Street script-writing team from 1985, and as the author of such fine television series as his 2002 version of John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga and last year's Island At War, set on a fictional Channel Island.

When Ayckbourn invited Mallatratt to Scarborough, he was still under contract to the Ipswich theatre, but he paid out his employers. Mallatratt originated roles in such Ayckbourn modern masterpieces as Confusions, Absent Friends and Bedroom Farce; other Ayckbourn proteges of this glorious past half-century at Scarborough were the playwrights James Saunders, Stephen Lowe, Robert Eaton and Tim Firth.

Mallatratt moved on to Bristol. When the Old Vic closed its collaborative operation in the nearby Little Theatre in the late 1970s, he and Neilson were among the outstanding group of actors who took the place over; others were Daniel Day-Lewis, Pete Postlethwaite, Pam Ferris and George Costigan.
Mallatratt returned to Scarborough in autumn 1985 and acted in Ayckbourn's production of The Brontës Of Howarth by Christopher Fry. When Ayckbourn took a sabbatical to join Peter Hall as a National Theatre associate, Mallatratt stayed on as the stand-in resident writer for stand-in artistic director Robin Herford.

Herford commissioned a play about witchcraft in Heptonstall that became the not too dissimilar precursor of The Woman In Black. The rest is history; Herford's only regret is that Mallatratt was about to hit "an even longer stride" as a dramatist.


(Taken from The Guardian's 2004 obituary for Stephen Mallatratt)

Who Is Susan Hill?

The play The Woman In Black is based on a novel by author Susan Hill. When I started reading, I assumed that the story was written in the early 1900s. It turns out that it wasn't - the book version of The Woman In Black was actually first published in 1983. I did a a little digging to learn more about Susan Hill and here's what I learned.

Author Susan Hill

Ms. Hill has written a number of novels - literary works, a number of ghost stories, children's books, detective novels, and even a memoir.

Born in Scarborough, England in 1942 her first novel, The Enclosure, was published in 1961 while she was still a student. She worked as a freelance journalist from 1963-1968. She was a presenter for BBC Radio's "Bookshelf" Program from 1986 - 1987. In 1996 she started her own publishing company, Long Barn Books.

Her books include I’m the King of the Castle (1970), winner of the Somerset Maugham Award; The Bird of Night (1972), winner of the Whitbread Novel Award and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (1972) ; and The Albatross, a collection of short stories, winner of the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She was appointed a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2012 for services to literature. 

The Backstory of "The Woman In Black"

The Woman In Black is the second longest running straight play in London's West End's history - second only to Agatha Christie's classic play The Mousetrap (4th overall if you count musicals) which is an achievement in and of itself. The fact that the play is really told only by two men (and one creepy ghost lady) makes it even more impressive in my book. It's a play that replies not on big lavish spectacle, but on two men who can tell a ripping good yarn. I got curious as to how the play came about, because the credits tell you straight away that it's based on a novella by Susan Hill. I did a little digging and found this backstory: 

Robin Herford was running the Stephen Joseph theatre in Scarborough when he realised he hadn't spent his entire grant. His boss, Alan Ayckbourn, was off on sabbatical, so Herford decided, what with Christmas coming up, to put on a ghost story that could be staged cheaply and quickly – not in the main theatre, but in the bar. He asked the venue's resident playwright Stephen Mallatratt to rustle one up, with the proviso that the set and costumes couldn't cost more than £1,000, adding that there was only enough money to pay four actors. 

"He wasn't terribly impressed," remembers Herford, 25 years on. "But he came back a couple of days later and said, 'Have you read Susan Hill's book The Woman in Black?'" Hill's creepy novella had been published a few years earlier, in 1983. "I read it overnight and said, 'It's a fantastic story – but it's got a dozen characters.'" 

"I've got an idea about that," said Mallatratt. His masterstroke was to make The Woman in Black a play within a play, one that needs just two speaking actors, and a backstage crew of four. Elderly Arthur Kipps brings a ghost story to a young actor; it's the story of something that happened to Kipps 30 years earlier, and the actor turns it into a drama. 

I rather love that one of the top grossing plays of all time was conceived by a scrappy theatre on a shoestring budget. 

Our fellows and lady are working hard at creating a creepy fun story for our version of The Woman In Black. I think that sitting in such an intimate theatre will really help amplify the story. And they look fabulous don't they? 

Tasi Alabastro, Lessa Bouchard, and Kevin Kirby
Photo by James Kasyan

The show opens next week - it has a pay-what-you-will preview on Thursday, October 9th and then runs Thursdays through Sundays till November 2nd. Pre-sales are pretty strong so get your seats while you can!