The Woman in Black

 My experience in the production of “The Woman in Black” was quite rich and varied. Unable to help before, I could only be useful to the director the week before the play and during the actual performances. One a few technical rehearsals, I took a closer look at the lighting, helping out as much as I could. I realized straight away that it was trickier than I thought on many levels. First, the actual technology took me a while to get, having the control panel to actually be up and running with the necessary lights attached took away most of our time. Having done that, you only have to flip the switches and I found this later stage quite amazing even. On other part of this that I hadn’t seen before was the setting up of the lights, having someone on a scaffold adjusting so it had the right color and covers the right area of space. The actual play was quite tricky in terms of lighting, since there were quite a few blackouts and very particular parts of the stage had to illuminated at different times. On the days of the performance, I did front of house, where I was also able to help out on the details and last minute changes to the set and setting, stunned by all the stress. Doing front of house was quite amusing, talking to the audience both before and after the play was helpful on giving me some ideas of what worked and what didn’t and how I can fix that when I stage a play.

The play was about a man who saw the ghost of a woman (the woman in black) and the sight of said phantom resulted in the death of his son and wife. In order to fix his traumas, he asked an actor to act out his story so it could be told in an effective and slightly entertaining way so that he could live in peace. The stage was therefore very minimalistic, which is even mention on the script since the Arthur Kipps (the traumatized man) was afraid that simple objects could not portray real life structures and environments. Being a horror story, the lighting was very dim and never intense, giving a creepy feel to the story. On one of the scenes there was no electric lighting and the actor only used matches to light the stage, which I think worked really well. The performances were amazing, specially the actor playing Arthur Kipps, since he had to perform different characters with very specific personalities and accents. The pre-recorded sound was also very well used and perfectly timed, and was the prime contributor to some of the audience’s jumps and setting the space. The only thing I did not like in the play was the consistent blackouts that happened. I think that overusing that element made the pace very uneven and the play a bit less scary since the play completely stopped for a couple of seconds really often. Overall I was very impressed by the production, mainly because they managed to do a fantastic and scary performance with very little props, time and actors.

Just as a final note, I want to share a funny and slightly embarrassing incident that happened on the first night of the performance. It was a particularly cold night, and before the performance someone had forgotten to turn on the heaters on the hall, so it is needless to say the people were freezing. When people left during the break, a woman came up to me and said: “Can’t you turn on the heater? It’s freezing in there!” Attempting to make things better through a bit of humor, I stated that “it was all part of the play” making you shiver in every way. I waited for a sympathetic smile, but all I got was a serious face and a blunt: “Turn on the heaters, please”.