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Not since Jonathan Harker travelled to Transylvania in Bram Stoker’s Dracula has an unwitting solicitor encountered such evil as awaits poor Arthur Kipps in Stephen Mallatratt’s stage version of the gothic ghost story The Woman in Black.
Vertigo Theatre wisely put this 37-year-old scare fest in the hands of Jamie Dunsdon, Calgary’s mistress of terror. Dunsdon is, after all, the director who kept Vertigo audiences on the edge of their seats two years ago with the stage version of Stephen King’s Misery. Dunsdon knows how to build suspense and where to insert the jump scares, and that’s precisely what The Woman in Black needs to keep it from being a snooze fest, because, at times, you feel more like you’re listening to an audiobook than observing a play.
The Woman in Black is a play within a play, and it’s more storytelling than acting so it requires two exceptional actors, which Dunsdon has found in Andy Curtis and Joe Perry.
Arthur Kipps (Curtis) wants the world to know there is an evil presence haunting Eel House in the village of Crythin Gilford, and what it did to ruin his life. He has written his story and has hired an actor (Perry), to teach him to perform it, which he intends to do for family and friends, and possibly even paying audiences.
Eventually, the actor decides to play the central role of Kipps and have Kipps play six or seven people the solicitor encountered on his journey from London to the remote northeast part of Britain.
Much of the first act has the actor schooling Kipps on how you can turn a blank stage and a few set pieces into a busy London street, an office, a train station and train coach, an inn, an old horse carriage and that spooky old mansion and its marsh that is cut off from the rest of Crythin Gilford each evening by the tide.
He teaches him, and the audience, about sound and lighting effects and the power of the imagination. He tells him that he has to have sympathy for the audience. He has to entertain them and give them a reason to stay in the theatre, which Curtis and Perry manage to do, with witty banter, all the wonderfully spooky sound effects supplied by Andrew Blizzard, and creepy lighting courtesy of Narda McCarroll.
The bare stage comes courtesy of Scott Reid, so you know there is more to it than first meets the eye. That back wall is actually a scrim and, when lit from behind, becomes a graveyard or a child’s nursery, both equally unsettling. There’s a door in the back wall, which is locked, so it has to be concealing something relevant to the ghost, and poor Perry will eventually dare to go through it.
It takes a particularly skilled actor, like Perry, to be able to walk around that bare stage as if he’s going from room to room in the gloomy mansion, or crawling through quicksand in the marsh, or wandering between tombstones, and have the audience squirm, and even scream when he does.
One of the locals gives Kipps a dog to keep him company and what Dunsdon and Perry do with that imaginary animal is a highlight of the production. The opening night audience was far more worried about what the ghost might do to that dog than even to Perry.
Curtis is a real chameleon who quickly and effortlessly inhabits each new character he plays, adding humour, pathos and tension where they are required.
The jump scares in the second act may be hokey, but boy do they work. Dunsdon immediately unsettles the audience by having Curtis and Perry walk around the aisles in the theatre. If they can do that, perhaps Spider the dog, and any other imaginary beings, might just do so also.
The Woman in Black is not a particularly good script, but, as the actor tells Kipp early on, it’s how a story is told, that is even more important than the story itself, and Dunsdon is a master storyteller.
The Woman in Black runs at Vertigo Theatre until Oct. 27.