The Woman in Black is the second-longest-running West End play in history, having been installed at the Fortune theatre for more than a quarter of a century. Given that it started life as a modest potboiler at the Stephen Joseph theatre in Scarborough, you’d think regional reps would be fighting among themselves to get their hands on the follow-up; yet Oldham Coliseum is the first to attempt to dramatise Susan Hill’s second full‑length ghost story, originally published in 1992. Maybe it’s cursed.
The trope of the mysterious, malevolent curse lies behind Hill’s Wilkie Collins pastiche, in which a restless young traveller named Monmouth becomes obsessed with the legacy of an infamous explorer known as Conrad Vane, despite repeated warnings from concerned priests, elderly librarians and hysterical psychics to leave well alone.
It has, in other words, much of the same ingredients of The Woman in Black – a callow hero following a foreboding manuscript to fog‑bound country properties – though sadly little of the actual suspense. Kevin Shaw’s production is a real pea‑souper, whose enveloping mists are illuminated by digital-media specialists Imitating the Dog. The interaction between live and filmed performance can be extremely impressive – there’s true virtuosity, for example, in the way Paul Warriner’s Monmouth draws back a digital curtain to reveal that the door that was previously behind it has mysteriously melted away.
Yet whereas Stephen Mallatratt’s genuinely terrifying adaptation of The Woman in Black required little more than two actors and a torch to play upon the susceptibility of an audience’s imagination, here one never loses the sense of a surfeit of special effects required to compensate for the nebulousness of the plot. Hill’s denouement is so perfunctory it’s practically comedic; and though it was never likely to match the chill factor of its illustrious predecessor, The Mist in the Mirror offers a fairly pale reflection.
• Until 21 February. Box office: 0161-624 2829. Venue: Oldham Coliseum theatre. Then touring.
