The Woman in Black

"The Woman in Black" started as a thriller fiction novel by Susan Hill published in 1983, a story about a menacing spectre that haunts a small English town. In 1987 it captured the attention of Stephen Mallatratt who saw in it a potential to tell not just a story of a young solicitor (Kipps) who encounters the terrifying and damaging world of the unexplained when he travels to a small remote English town to take care of the final affairs of his firm’s client, but to tell the story of the theatre itself by bringing back to life the two of the theatre’s most powerful tools: the actors’ ability to tell the story and the audiences’ imagination that allows them to suspend their disbelief and enter the world conceived by the theatre’s creative team. To translate a novel into a piece for the stage, Mallatratt creates a play within a play and sets the main drama in the Edwardian theatre, where an older Kipps is seeking an actor’s help to tell his story and hopefully purge the grip the events from his younger life still have on him. Telling the story, reliving it together, pulls both actors and the audience, like the quicksand of the marshes they describe, back into Kipps’ past.

The stage play was first performed at the Stephen Joseph Theatre-In-The-Round in Scarborough, UK in 1987. It was very well received and moved to the Fortune Theatre in London's West End in 1989 where it still runs today, as well as currently being on a UK National Tour.

January 10,11,12 - hosted by and benefits "Carnegie Center For Literacy and Learning"
January 17 - hosted by and benefits "Kentucky Historical Society Foundation"