The Actor, is startled to find that the stuttering Kipps now overcomes his stage fright his memories of these distinct people are so strong, that he imitates them all flawlessly, and is finally able to, as he wants, “relive it through the telling.”īut the deeper he reanimates his experiences, the more painful it is. But Kipps is a nervous performer, and can’t play himself in his own script, so he and the Actor switch roles, with Kipps taking on all the supporting parts and the actor playing his client’s younger self. Arthur Kipps (David Acton), the lawyer who experienced the feverish horrors of sinister Eel Marsh House many years before, has written them down-but instead of publishing them as is, contacts a theater practitioner (Ben Porter) to figure out how to deliver his story orally to a crowd. The play quickly becomes a meditation about the kind of occultish magic that only the theater, where flesh-and-blood bodies are convincingly taken over by other identities, can produce. And when he begins to sort through the affairs of the deceased woman, he begins to have terrifying encounters with a malevolent spirit, who materializes as a skeletal young woman wearing a black dress and veil. Everyone in the town is afraid of the remote mansion to which he must travel, so he enters it alone.

Susan Hill’s novel (sort of a cross between Dracula and The Turn of the Screw) is about a no-nonsense London solicitor who arrives in a small countryside town to settle the estate of a recently deceased elderly recluse. How do we encounter figures from the past, and how do we revive them? How do we communicate with beings not physically there to talk back to us-or, how can they talk to us, when they are not there? How do we bring stories to life? The ghost story offers a popular format to exercise (exorcise?) these questions, but the production of the gothic The Woman in Black has some other ideas up its sleeve. Watching the production, which is as much about being alive and not, as it is about encountering the oscillating corporeality and ephemerality of the theater space, I couldn’t help but think of a sentence written by the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt about how to reconcile writing about texts of the distant past: “I began with a desire to speak to the dead.” The McKittrick Hotel, already the home to the eerie, theatrical somnambulation Sleep No More, has offered one of its many empty, low-lit crannies to host a second production during this bleak mid-winter season: the West End’s long-running hit The Woman in Black, based on Susan Hill’s 1983 novel of the same name.

The woman in black book susan hill