‘For all the promise of terror, the result is an entertaining but ultimately safe night at the theatre’ … Daniel Macpherson and John Waters in The Woman in Black.‘For all the promise of terror, the result is an entertaining but ultimately safe night at the theatre’ … Daniel Macpherson and John Waters in The Woman in Black.
The disruptive punter is the Actor, played by MacPherson 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’s told is important too. Sympathy for the audience means meeting them halfway – and giving them a reason to stay interested.
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.
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.
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