The fun of being scared together: Andrew Ritchie directs The Woman In Black, to open the Teatro Live! season

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

“People love to be scared,” says Andrew Ritchie decisively. (And  he’s got a whole movie industry to back him up on that).

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The genial director of The Woman in Black, the atmospheric horror-thriller opening the Teatro Live! season on the Varscona stage Friday, hopes to “make us scream.” He has at his disposal a long-running hit that had been doing exactly in London’s West End for 34 years until it closed in 2023. What Ritchie has in mind, beyond the dread and the shivers and the jump scares is “sweeping us up in the story and making us care about the characters.”

Ritchie’s Teatro debut is an ingeniously theatrical two-actor adaptation, by the English playwright Stephen Mallatratt, of the gothic 1982 novel by Susan Hill. “Scary fun… and at the heart of it a tragic story,” as Ritchie says, looking for vagueness. “Real tragedy happens to some people … a family … families.…. I don’t want to give too much away!”.

The Woman In Black is an Edwardian era ghost story that takes us to the eerie windswept marshes of northeastern England, and a haunting. And it comes with all the classic remote country house trimmings, and “a Victorian era Dickensian sort of vibe,” as Ritchie puts it. “It lives in a similar world to the other ghost play that’s done in Edmonton every year, A Christmas Carol.”

The particular cleverness of The Woman In Black is that’s a play within a play, with a cast of only two who play many characters. And it starts in a theatre.

Geoffrey Simon Brown and Julien Arnold in rehearsal for The Woman in Black, Teatro Live! Photo by Cassie Duval.

An elderly lawyer, one Arthur Kipps (Julien Arnold), has hired an actor to turn the mysterious story of what happened to his younger self 30 years before into a drama. “The play is so theatrical, meta-theatrical,” says Ritchie in appreciation. “So much of the play — someone hiring an actor/director to help him perform a piece of text — mirrors our own process in the (rehearsal) hall. You are watching a play. And we are working on a play together….”

A director friend described it to Ritchie as “the play tells you how the magic trick works, then shows you the magic trick,” he says. In effect, the theatre is the set. And this has delighted the founder and director of Thou Art Here Theatre, a company that specializes in site-specific original work. “The play is so theatrical, meta-theatrical…. It really embraces its medium; it embraces its space, and places itself in a theatre.”

“We’re really using the Varscona and being inspired by the space that we’re in,” he says of the formally old-school, red velvet curtain theatre. Theatres are famously haunted places. And the Varscona, the storied home of many companies, re-built from the ground up in 2016 to include bricks from its previous incarnation, has its share of ghosts. For Ritchie himself, it’s “a theatre where I spent a lot of time as a younger artist…. I feel very lucky; this is coming home to a place with a lot of memories.”

Andrew Ritchie is directing the Teatro Live! production of The Woman In Black. Photo supplied.

“Improv with Rapid Fire Theatre, that’s how I got my start,” he says. And the Varscona was the epicentre of RFT’s late-night improv, with full-house audiences lining up outside in every kind of weather. He still remembers his Grade 10 self, coming to the Varscona in 2003 to see Theatresports, at 11 p.m. “And it blew my mind! I fell in love with improv…. It led me back to the U of A to take a drama drama class, and eventually to directing. Improv was definitely my gateway drug….”

“There was just an energy around the Varscona. And it’s so cool to be back in the building, directing on that stage! Working on such a smart play…. I’ve been working a lot of new plays the last couple of years. Which is fantastic. But it’s a real shift and a welcome one, to work on something you could call tried and true.”

Scaring audiences in live theatre is tricky, to be sure. What the audience can see, and not see, is easier to control in film, with camera angles, cuts, “what you show, what you don’t.” The technical resources of theatre, the possibilities of light and sound, are the playground for the Teatro creative team.  Darkness figure prominently in the design of lighting whiz T. Erin Gruber, Ritchie says.

With its traditional ghost story accoutrements, the piece stands in high contrast to the usual original indie ventures of Thou Art Here Theatre, Ritchie’s theatrical home base. Next up there is his own Cycle (Dec. 11 to 22, at the Mile Zero Dance Warehouse), an exploration of urban bicycling, the gig culture, a vision of cities. Meanwhile he’s enjoying the liberation of being a freelance director at Teatro. As indie artists “we produce our own work, and fund-raise for ourselves. And the opportunity to be hired as a director, and focus on the craft of directing and not worry about (all that) is such a gift.”

Ritchie has collaborated with Brown before, in a variety of applications (the latter is the Cycle dramaturg, for example) but never directed him onstage. And it’s his first time working with Arnold, a veteran Edmonton theatre artist and Teatro star. “They’re great to work with,” he says, “very funny people, and they’re actors that love acting. They dive into their roles! …. And because there are just two actors, they have to trust each other.”

The play offers the kind of challenge expert actors love, says Ritchie. “A full range of emotions, multiple characters, different dialects, different physical bodies, switching between them very quickly.”

Is The Woman In Black an unusual choice for a self-identified “comedy company”? “The more I thought about it, the more it feels in the realm of what the company has always been doing,” says Ritchie. After all, the work of the company’s resident playwright (and founder) Stewart Lemoine “lives in a world with a certain kind of language, (fuelled by) the power of words and language. And The Woman In Black feels in that world, set like some of Stewart’s plays in a kind of nebulous past, a bygone time.”

And the Teatro Live! archive does include thrillers, Rope, Deathtrap, Sleuth among them. “It’s all about having fun, exploring different kinds of fun,” Ritchie thinks. “This one is scary fun…. Enjoyable horror, pleasurable fear. It’s pleasurable to be scared together.”

PREVIEW

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: Oct. 10 to 27

Tickets: teatrolive.com