The Woman in Black, derived from Susan Hill’s suspense novel by Stephen Mallatratt, makes its long-delayed New York City debut. Set in the Hidden Club Car pub in the atmospheric McKittrick Hotel, where the immersive Sleep No More has been playing for the past several seasons, Woman is an intermittently entertaining ghost tale which takes quite a while to get to its goosebump-inducing chills.
Hill’s 1983 novel concerns a vengeful specter haunting an isolated English village and served as the basis of a 2012 film starring Daniel Radcliffe. Mallatratt inserts a framing device with the hero of the book, a milquetoast solicitor named Arthur Kipps (versatile David Acton), collaborating with an unnamed actor (commanding Ben Porter) on a stage version of the horror tale which he lived. This iteration first played a London pub in 1987 and went on to become the second-longest run in West End history, surpassed only by Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap.
There is much time-filling dialogue about Kipps not being a performer and stumbling amateurishly over his lines and blocking. Naturally, once the story-within-a-story takes over, the novice turns into a brilliant thespian, delivering incisive, varying interpretations of a slew of secondary roles while the unnamed actor assumes Kipps’s part as the hero of the shocking tale.
After an interminable exposition, we finally get into the haunted house and director Robin Herford, lighting designer Anshuman Bhatia, and sound designer Sebastian Frost (Rod Mead is credited creating the original sound) plunge us into a delightfully scary nightmare. But the shocks and screams, all unleashed in the last half-hour, hardly seem worth the long wait. The pub atmosphere is jolly, and you can sip on your favorite cocktail to pass the time till the genuine frights arrive.
