The Woman In Black, Dir Robin Herford, Truro

The matinee performance fills 850 seats in the theatre with almost exclusively school trips for GCSE sufferers and a smattering of unsuspecting individuals who each look somewhat crestfallen to be confronted with a venue full of over-excited young people released from the confines of the classroom for an afternoon, some of whom have never been out of their own localities into the city. They shove and giggle and squeal and, most delightful of all, every time they are frightened they scream with the effect of a Mexican wave, started off by one pre-emptive female and taken up in relay throughout the entire auditorium. This prolonged screaming is followed by a similar wave of laughter which relieves the tension in the dark. There is a significant element of heightened drama here, and it’s not on the stage.

On stage, however, the performance is robust and engaging, led by Dominic Marsh, a tall, impassioned thesp who delivers his lines with force, clarity and precision. Michael Burrell plays the older man who has engaged the services of said thesp to help him tell the story of an experience he had when a young man, so they both act out the drama with Burrell constantly switching characters in order to be all the people in his story, which is very entertaining.

This is an interesting adaptation by Stephen Mallatratt of Susan Hill's ghost story, now in its nineteenth year, The woman in black appears occasionally, which causes the screaming, but does not appear on stage to take a bow, so perhaps she was never there. You know what is said about theatres.

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