Theatre review: The Woman in Black – The Lowry

Recall any age-old gothic novel – ghost stories by the fire, a crumbling mansion on an isolated marsh, creaking stairways.

Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black no doubt sets the standard for the contemporary gothic and its stage-show is no different.

Add into the mix the menacing sound of a wooden rocking chair and the soft luring lullaby of a children’s music box and you have the ingredients for a blood-curdling night.

The Woman in Black certainly has all the necessary ingredients to fill its readers with terror and the play, adapted by Stephen Mallatratt for the stage, drip-feeds them with perfectly controlled horror so symptomatic of gothic fiction.

Performed almost entirely by two cast members, David Acton as Mr Kipps and Matthew Spencer as The Actor, the play flows between a present adaptation of an elderly Mr Kipps’ memoirs and the play when completed.

The constant flicking between both alternative realities offers a catharsis in some of the play’s most tense and spine-chilling moments, which at times elicited horrified screams from the audience.

You could be forgiven for finding the first half of the play a little slow to get going, but like all good ghost stories, the scene-setting is just as important as the climax.

It isn’t until post-interval that the real action begins, with the Woman in Black herself, Jennet Humfrye’s, corpse-white face lurking hauntingly behind a sheer black curtain, floating behind gravestones and leaving each audience member looking warily over their shoulders.

This play arrives at The Lowry as it celebrates 27 years on the West End and little has changed since it toured in 2015 – the minimalistic use of effects, lighting and props leave almost everything to the imagination.

But arguably this is the power of the gothic genre which leaves so much to its readers’ minds that they are just as twisted by the end of the performance as its crazed protagonists.

The lack of tweaking, however, does nothing to tone down the nail-biting tension and the shocks that throw you out of your own seat.

Matthew Spencer, portraying The Actor, is the absolute stand-out star of this show, seamlessly flowing from a bumbling, terrorised Mr Jerome, a grumbling Keckwick and Sam Daily, a friendly country-bumpkin who offers his dog to Mr Kipps for comfort.

What can be said for certain is that the subtle horror of the performance hasn’t been undermined by the 2012 film adaptation and continues to leave audiences in stunned silence as the lights come up.

The shows runs until tomorrow (Saturday, March 25).