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by Stephen Mallatratt, directed by Robin Herford

David and Hannah Mirvish present PW Productions & Pemberley Productions, CAA Theatre, 651 Yonge Street, Toronto

December 7, 2025-January 4, 2026

Kipps: “Well, I’m not going to be put out by a ghost”

The Woman in Black makes its Canadian debut with an enviable reputation. The ghost story played in London’s West End from 1989 to 2023, racking up 13,232 performances making it the second longest running play in English-language theatre. It arrives in Toronto on its North American tour with such raves as “a journey into fear”(New York Times), “guaranteed to chill the blood (Evening Standard) and “the scariest show in town” (Chicago Tribune). On the evidence of the opening matinee performance, however, it is hard to see what anyone found so scary about it. It is also impossible to understand how a play with such a laborious set-up could have run for 33 years.

The play The Woman in Black was adapted in 1987 by actor and playwright Stephen Mallatratt (1947-2004) from the novel of the same name by Susan Hill. Like the novel the play tells three nested stories. The surrounding story concerns Arthur Kipps, a man in his 50s, who has an urgent need to tell the tale of events that happened to him when he was in his 20s. These events include Kipps’s discovery of dire happenings during the Edwardian period that have led to the horrors he experienced in his 20s.

In his younger days, Kipps, a lawyer for a firm in London, was assigned the task of sorting out the estate of Alice Drablow, one of the firm’s clients, who has died at the age of 87. She lived in a large house, Eel Marsh House, on land connected to the village of Crythin Gifford by a causeway. In high tide the house is completely cut off from the village which itself is surround by dangerous marshes. At the funeral for Mrs. Drablow and several times after that in around the house, Kipps perceives the figure of a Woman in Black who, as he comes to realize, is a ghost. The great secret of who this Woman is and why she haunts the house is told him by Samuel Daily, a local landowner, only when Kipps has done his work and is ready to leave the village.

Though Hill wrote the novel in 1983 it’s central story is very old-fashioned. People who hear mention of Mrs. Drablow’s will tell him nothing or warn him not to visit her house. The landscape of Crythin Gifford and Eel Marsh House is a combination of Gothic tropes. The causeway (like that in Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun from 1941) and the marshes, like the moors in Wuthering Heights (1847) or The Hound of the Baskervilles(1902) creates a feeling of danger and isolation. This feeling is heightened by the occurrence of sea frets or the sudden bouts of fog that blot everything out. Eerie sounds in the house, the one door that will not open, furniture mysteriously moved – these are all antique clichés of the haunted house genre.

In the novel, Kipps feels the need to write down his story in order to free his mind of it. In the play Kipps has already written down the story but feels the need to read out the story to free his mind. A character named “The Actor” convinces Kipps the story should be acted. It’s understandable that Mallatratt would make this change in a stage adaptation, but he spends so much time detailing this frame that we wonder when we are ever going to arrive at the ghost story we came to see.

For far too long the play focusses on the difficulty that Kipps has in trying to act. He can’t project and he puts no emotion into the very words he has written. The Actor tries to give him advice but the project repeatedly seems on the verge of falling apart. Finally, the Actor realizes that Kipps is terrible at playing himself and decides to play Kipps himself. Kipps will play all the other roles. After a rusty start, Kipps suddenly, and rather unbelievably, becomes a fine actor. Mallatratt, however, doesn’t leave it at this. Instead, he frequently has the Actor and Kipps break the action of the story to comment on what has happened or how they are doing. Needless to say, these interruptions are deleterious to the generation of tension.

What is unusual in Mallatratt’s adaptation is how much he makes certain that we know we are watching a play about a ghost story. The frame with the Actor and Kipps and their constant interruptions of the action is only one aspect of this. Michael Holt’s set for the play is a space behind the fraying curtain of a run-down theatre. All the props are ordinary objects. The actors change costumes in full view of the audience.

Kipps says to the Actor: “There are so many things we cannot represent. How do we represent the dog, the sea, the causeway? How the pony and trap?” The Actor’s answer is “With imagination, Mr. Kipps. Our’s, and or audience’s”. Turning a large wicker trunk about, he and Kipps sit on it, mime a bumpy ride and voilà – it’s the trap.

One might think this emphasis on the power of the imagination would somehow affect the ghost story being told. We might think that Mallatratt would keep us in greater doubt whether the Woman in Black really is a ghost or just a figment of Kipps’s imagination. Unfortunately, this is not true. Knowing that the black-clad figure with a bright white mask-like face is meant to be a ghost actually makes the story less frightening, not more. The most effective appearance of the Woman in Black is at the funeral where Anshuman Bhatia’s lighting is so low that we can’t really tell whether the Woman in Black is really there or not. The general scheme of the design is to make the Woman look more substantial in each of her subsequent appearances. To me the more substantial the Woman looked, the more she looked like an actor in a costume.

One need have no qualms about the top-drawer acting. Ben Porter, who plays the Actor, draws a good deal of comedy from the frustration, not entirely repressed, that the Actor feels in coping with Mr. Kipps’s bizarre request to act out his own story. The more that Kipps exclaims how important this project is to him, the more Porter has the Actor relent in his criticism until he has the bright idea of playing the role of Kipps himself. When he plays Kipps, the edge Porter had given the Actor vanishes and he gives us an eager but naïve young man totally unprepared for the dark world he is about to enter.

As Mr. Arthur Kipps himself, David Acton is so effective as a non-actor that at the beginning we wonder whether someone has forgotten to turn his mic on since he can barely be heard. Acton brings out the humour in Kipps’s ineptness at understanding how theatre works, but, thankfully, once Kipps clicks with the role of the solicitor Mr. Bentley, we find that Acton is a master at distinguishing the seven roles he plays through voice and facial expression. Acton is earnest but encouraging as Mr. Bentley, eerily taciturn as the coachman Mr. Keckwick and at first ebullient, later soberly thoughtful as Mr. Daily, the landowner Kipps befriends on his train journey. Mallatratt has both actors also act as narrators and both clearly distinguish through tone of voice their “real” selves from their roles as actors in Kipps’s story and from their stance as narrators of that story.

While the actors do conjure up a note of rising fear, director Robin Herford has left the task of creating a volatile atmosphere to the lighting designer Bhatia and to the sound designer Sebastian Frost. Bhatia illumines the stage with a general shifting gloominess when inside for Kipps’s story contrasting with a glowing brightness when the Actor and Kipps discuss the play. Frost is largely responsible for producing the scares through sudden loud shrieks that pierce his effective naturalistic soundscapes.

There have been so many more effective haunted house movies produced in the last hundred years that it is surprising that a stage version of Susan Hill’s novel, since filmed twice, should have so caught the imagination of audiences to have produced such a record run. The stage version of The Woman in Black, however, can very much be appreciated as a showcase for superb acting. I was very glad to have seen Acton on stage again and pleased to get to know Porter. I hope to see them in future in a more rewarding play.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: David Acton as Kipps and Ben Porter as the Actor; David Acton as Kipps; Ben Porter as the Actor. © 2025 PW Productions & Pemberley Productions.

For tickets visit: www.mirvish.com.