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I saw "The Woman in Black" 13 years ago at Spoleto Festival U.S.A., in a production by Dublin's revered Gate Theatre. I drifted into inattention after half an hour and stayed there.
So I fortified myself with sleep and caffeine before seeing "Woman" at Theatre Charlotte. They helped a bit, but the play still seems thinner than the fog hovering at the heart of this none-too-terrifying story.
Surely the point of any great ghost tale is to immerse us fully in supernatural horror, to supply an unrelieved atmosphere of gloom or fright. But this play, adapted by Stephen Mallatratt from the novel by Susan Hill, does precisely the opposite.
It begins with a man named Arthur Kipps (Joe Copley) hiring an actor (Patrick Hogan) to train him to perform a story he has written. Kipps plans to act it out for his family, thus delivering himself from the nasty vision that keeps preying on his mind. (Yes, this is nonsensical.)
They stand in an abandoned theater, discussing Kipps' plan. Then, for the rest of "Woman," the unnamed actor plays Kipps in a re-enactment of the nightmare, while the real Kipps plays solicitors and coachmen and laborers he met at the time.
This Brechtian "it's only a play" device consistently dissipates suspense but has two small virtues. First, it reminds us that drama conjures moods with only words and sound effects. Second, it leads to a small payoff, though one Mallatratt has clumsily forecast earlier.
Supernatural flashbacks offer typical Victorian elements: mist over quicksand-filled moors, the cry of an unseen child, a lonely house surrounded by water at high tide, a wasted specter whose appearance means doom. I don't know if such traditions can still scare Americans, but the first-night crowd giggled more than once.
I can't fault Copley, who carefully delineates characters, or Theatre Charlotte newcomer Hogan, who gets all the shivers he can from this flimsy dialogue. Director Vito Abate uses the whole theater innovatively, and Chris Bateson's sound design is spookier than anything spoken by the cast.
I suppose the main idea is that terrors of the mind are more disturbing than things we see and hear clearly. On rare occasions, this is so. (Try the 1963 film "The Haunting.") But the compelling mystery in this case is how so bland a play has run in London's West End for more than two decades.
