The Woman in Black is a brilliant play. The strong resistance to perform that starts the play is enough to set the theme. Then the stage, the acting, the mist covering the audience and taking us into the marshes. Everything from Dickens's Havisham (the main character's fiancé/wife is even called Stella) to Poe's raven comes to mind here. The audience in itself is quite an experience as the man behind me jumps when the ghost appears uttering everything from 'Jesus Christ' to 'God damn' as he is jolted in his seat, the woman in the front row utters her has and ohs, and the rest of the audience is quick to shriek when they are made to shriek.
This is a story of a man in need of telling his story in order to exorcise his demons. And resisting 'performing' his story because it is not entertainment, he is gradually sucked into the act of entertainment through the brilliant performance of his tutor as he displays emotions he feels himself. It is a story of how art can indeed imitate life, and even creep into it, as stealthily as the woman in black creeps into the tutor's life.
The scenes in the haunted house are amazingly put together, and the blatant reliance on the audience's imagination, so frequently stressed in the words of the actors themselves, goes further into presenting how art isn't only very capable of imitating life, but can go beyond that by imagining it (as the audience imagines a dog and a horse when no dog or horse are on stage)
It is the story of a woman who had to give up her baby and, having almost watched him die, seeks revenge from all who know her story. And when the solicitor in charge of her sister's estate (the main character here) goes to the marshes to look at her papers, the story unfolds to him. That the woman is a ghost here, that the woman doesn't appear at the end as the actors salute the audience, and that the woman is, in spite of all this, the center of it all, resonates very strongly with my feminist readings of texts.
P.s. Pictures to be added later, when acquired
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