'The Woman in Black' at Mirvish is a ghost story that will lull you to sleep — then give you nightmares

Those winding tales almost always started as a bore, leaden with far too much exposition for an 11-year-old to fully grasp. And as night fell, with the temperatures dipping, my fellow campers and I would begin to nod off one by one. But before any of us could completely escape into la-la land, just on the cusp of consciousness, our counsellors would deliver some of the most petrifying jump scares that you could imagine — leaping out of the bushes, screaming at the top of their lungs. 

In hindsight, I’m not quite sure whether this was just bad storytelling or a genius tactic to disarm us youngsters, who thought we were too old and too cool to be frightened by these ghost stories. But it worked in the end. And it became the stuff of nightmares. 

Stephen Mallatratt’s stage adaptation of Susan Hill’s classic novel is strikingly similar. Its first act plays out like a stuffy British drama, bogged down with unnecessary scenes and dialogue. But when you return after intermission, dreading what you think will be another hour of tedium, director Robin Herford’s production lunges at you like a zombie in a haunted house. 

It’s in this second half that “The Woman in Black” finally delivers on its promise of classic jump scare theatre. And Herford’s staging, remounted in Toronto by Anthony Eden, is calibrated in a way that maximizes every scream. 

Just listen to how Sebastian Frost’s hair-raising sound design wraps around the theatre. (At Sunday’s opening performance, it made me turn around in fear more than once to check what was lingering behind my shoulder.) Or watch how Anshuman Bhatia’s moody lighting toggles between focusing on certain objects and raising the house lights on the entire audience.

All these elements come together to unsettle the viewer. So much so that when the jump scares did arrive, I could feel myself recoiling in terror, my heart pounding in my chest. 

But it takes too long for Mallatratt’s play to get there. And, whether intentional or not, I think part of the reason why the jump scares are so successful is because — like those ghost stories I heard at camp — this tale is simply so dull up until that turning point. Ultimately, much of the surprise is derived from the sheer narrative whiplash.

Most of the first half is hampered by an awkward, play-within-a-play framing device. Arthur Kipps, an elderly lawyer, has rented a theatre and hired an actor. The reason why, we soon learn, is that he wants to share his story of a paranormal encounter when he was a young solicitor. 

After a few drawn-out scenes in which Kipps discovers he can’t muster up the courage to play his younger self, he asks the unnamed actor to take on his role, with Kipps portraying all the other characters. 

The lawyer’s story itself centres on the death of one of his clients, Alice Drablow of Eel Marsh House. When Kipps heads to the woman’s town for her funeral, he quickly finds out that Alice was a mercurial figure, whom few other townsfolk want even to mention by name. Later, at his client’s burial, Kipps notices a mysterious figure — cloaked in all black and, as he describes, with “skin stretched over her bones.” 

“The Woman in Black” plays out not merely as a ghost story but also as a mystery. And at its heart lies the question: Who is the title character? 

But Mallatratt’s play-within-a-play structure deflates much of the work’s tension, especially each time the script hops between the parallel narratives. The story also includes long-winded tangents into everything from London traffic to the English countryside. Maybe these detours resonate with audiences in the West End, where “The Woman in Black” ran for more than three decades. But not so here in Toronto. 

The roles of Arthur and the actor are shared in this production by three actors in repertory. (David Acton, Ben Porter and James Byng.) On opening night, Acton played Kipps, accentuating the character’s jittery neuroticism. Porter, meanwhile, portrayed the actor, initially the embodiment of poise before being sucked into a vortex of his own demons. 

The pair are great together. But while Acton and Porter have strong chemistry (and the play does include the necessary jump scares to qualify it as a ghost story), “The Woman in Black” never offers anything more of substance. 

Horror is a challenging genre to present onstage. Unlike film, the director of a live play is confined by the physical limitations of the far more analogue theatrical medium. 

That’s why horror plays can’t succeed on mere jump scares alone. The best works of this genre dig deeper, into their audience’s subconscious, planting seeds of doubt along the way. Such was the case with Keith Barker and Thomas Morgan Jones’s astounding one-man horror show “The Veil” earlier this season at Crow’s Theatre, which left audiences contemplating the horror within themselves long after the final curtain. 

“The Woman in Black” tries to do the same, balancing the horror with the psychological drama. Its final reveal, I imagine, is meant to leave viewers quietly trembling in their seats. But the play never manages to achieve that intended effect because it doesn’t successfully build up to that climactic moment.

On opening night, in fact, that final revelation elicited a smattering of laughs throughout the audience. And that pretty much sums up “The Woman in Black” as a whole. It delivers some terrifying scares in the moment. But it’s one — thankfully or not — that lets you quickly laugh it off.