Stephen Mallatratt's The Woman In Black

Stephen Mallatratt’s ‘The Woman in Black’ tells the tale of a man called Mr Kipps who tells the story of what he encountered at Eel Marsh house, while he was a solicitor. Set at the turn of the last century, the play deals with the themes of insanity, revenge and fear of the unknown. It is set at a time when science started to overrule superstition, and so people believed what science said, not what old books said.

The structure of Mallatratt’s adaptation takes the form of the play within a play structure, which allows a play to be intertwined with another play. For example, the actual play we watched was two men (an actor and Mr Kipps) rehearsing a play of what Mr Kipps experienced when he visited Eel Marsh House, earlier in his years. In

The production also employed gauzes to create the illusion of a small space (which later on in the play, we can see behind the gauze and we find out that the stage isn’t as small as we originally thought it was), which reflects the idea of secrets being withheld. This idea is more clearly seen when the gauze is lit up (when young Kipps goes into the locked room) and you see that The Woman in Black has been stopping Young Kipps from going into her son’s bedroom, so that it stays untouched. We didn’t know how the child had been treated up to that point, and after seeing the child’s room, we can then decipher that he had been spoilt by his adopted mother. Each area represented a number of different settings. For example; the runway represented the Woman in Black’s grave, and also the marshes when The Woman in Black tried to drown Spider; the space behind the gauze was used when young Kipps is in the bedroom, running around the house, or when The Woman in Black is walking around the upper tier of the house; The main section of the stage is used for everything else, like a church and it’s graveyard, the train journey, out on the marshes when he is travelling to and from Eel Marsh House, the theatre when they flash in and out of the inner play, and the fete that they go to when The Woman in

The props set on stage included a wicker basket, some buckets (their only purpose is to be knocked over later in the production to provide one of the first jump-scares in the play), two chairs and a coat rail with multiple costumes hanging on it. The wicker basket is constantly used as multiple different things throughout the play, such as a table, bed, seats on a train, a trunk, pony and trap, and many more. The pony and trap was presented so that we believed it was a pony and trap, and not just a wicker basket. They did this by bouncing themselves up and down on the basket (to create the illusion of movement) and by using sound effects (such as horse hooves hitting the floor). Specific props were of particular note. Some helped to establish character. For example, old Kipps didn’t want to perform what he had written, but when he put Bentley’s glasses on, he almost instantly became the character of Bentley. Other props served to heighten tension, such as the rocking chair situated in the child’s bedroom. The Woman in Black would sit and furiously rock on her chair, the noise of which would echo throughout the house. After the first time of discovering what it was, every time we hear that same noise, the tension immediately rises, as we have seen what it does and who does it – it makes us feel uneasy and unsafe where we are