Don’t look now, but who’s that behind you? The Woman in Black, at Teatro Live! A review.

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

“Have sympathy for your audience!” roars The Actor (Geoffrey Simon Brown) emphatically at the start of The Woman In Black, the hit thriller that launches the Teatro Live! season at the Varscona. “Draw on your emotions and our imagination.”

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Andrew Ritchie’s crack production does both.

The Actor has been hired to coach a stiff elderly solicitor, one Arthur Kipps (Julien Arnold), in the fine art of performance. Arthur is a test case for beginner thesp lessons (one of our best actors, Arnold tackles bad acting expertly). But he persists. He feels a compelling need to release the nightmare burden that’s haunted him for 30 years by telling his story to an audience, his family. “Terrible things have happened to me,” he says. “The story must be told.”

The story is a classic old-school goth chiller, of Edwardian provenance. It takes us to a gloomy mansion in a desolate salt marsh on the northeast coast of England, a house so isolated it’s only accessible across a skinny causeway at low tide. But as for the storytelling, the fun of The Woman In Black, a cunning and intricate 1987 adaptation by English playwright Stephen Mallatratt of Susan Hill’s novel — it ran in the West End for 34 years before it closed in 2023 — is that it belongs so fully to the theatre.

It engages “our emotions and our imagination” in the ingenious ways it uses deliberately minimalist theatrical props (a trunk, a couple of chairs, a door, a doll) designed by Alison Yanota, and the technical resources of the theatre. It’s a study in unlocking the power of suggestion to create suspense. When a rocking chair rocks, by itself, in Act II, the audience gasps. Which reminds you how fun it is to share a gasp with an audience.

Geoffrey Simon Brown and Julien Arnold in The Woman in Black, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Ritchie’s production, and his team of designers, are inspired by the possibilities of this theatre playground. Leona Brausen’s costumes — bowlers, Edwardian suits, rustic garb for the northerners — locate the story in time. The Actor and Arthur Kipps marvel at the “recorded sound,” as they put it, and there’s unnerving live sound too, interspersed with creaks, the whoosh of wind, disembodied shrieks at various imaginary distances, all part of Tori Morrison’s dramatic sound design. And the lighting created by T. Erin Gruber is a character too, an unsettling landscape of semi-visibility, shadows, darkness erupting into startling flashes, flickering lights from mysterious sources. Lighting and sound surround us in this storytelling, from behind, through the aisles, in the unexplored pockets of darkness at the edges of the stage.

Both sound and light play across a gauzy screen that separates past and present. And it opens to reveal — no, suggest — the mysterious labyrinth of Eel Marsh House, in Yanota’s design.

In short, the theatre feels occupied, so to speak, by the story. The play begins in a darkened Edwardian theatre, and the Varscona, with its proscenium, its red velvet curtains, its brick and wood, turns in a fine period performance. That Strathcona venue has never felt smaller, and that’s a compliment.

Geoffrey Simon Brown in The Woman in Black, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

I’ve left the narrative to the last, because there’s a lot that mustn’t be revealed in advance (as The Actor says at the outset, “have sympathy for the audience” and I’m all for that.”). The Woman In Black is a play within a play, and there’s a moment when the inner play slides in and takes over, and the actors switch places. Geoffrey Simon Brown plays the younger Arthur Kipps, a skeptical lawyer sent by his London office to the village on the marsh, to settle the affairs of the elderly occupant, deceased, of Eel Marsh House. He doesn’t believe in ghosts, but…. The performance charts the gradual escalation of his unease into terror. “What are you holding back? I must know!” he cries to a local.

Julien Arnold and Geoffrey Simon Brown in The Woman in Black, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

And Arnold, unleashing a whole arsenal of accents, plays everyone else the young Kipps meets on his life-changing journey north, taciturn villagers and eerie pony cart drivers included. In Arnold’s performance the characters are precisely differentiated. “You may doubt,” says one village dweller. “We know.”

In a thriller with only two credited actors (and one uncredited dog, excellent in the role of Spider), the challenge to the actors to conjure the full cast is extreme. And these are actors who dig in. This, incidentally, is the second production of the theatre season in which a character will holler “Stella!” at top volume.

There’s the tickling suspense of wondering, and there are scary surprises, my friends, in this season of the scary. Buy in — the invitation offered by the production is alluring — and see what live theatre can do.

Check out ’s PREVIEW interview with director Andrew Ritchie.

REVIEW

The Woman In Black

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written by: Stephen Mallatratt from a novel by Susan Hill

Directed by: Andrew Ritchie

Starring: Julien Arnold, Geoffrey Simon Brown

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Oct. 27

Tickets: teatrolive.com