Guest Blog: Terence Wilton Talks THE WOMAN IN BLACK

Last week I was delighted to receive a good luck card from the splendid and venerable actor John Nettleton. "There, my blessings on thee," it said. He reminded me that he had last said those words to me as Polonius (I played Laertes, his son) in Hamlet at The Old Vic Theatre nearly 40 years ago.

Johnny went on to play Mr Kipps in The Woman in Black for some 750 performances in the 1990s, and "never stopped enjoying it". Over many years, Mr Kipps has been played by dozens of talented mature actors, many of them famous - a formidable gallery of distinguished ancestors. I am the humble and most recent inheritor of the role, and to date I have given just 10 extremely fresh performances.

Nobody knows this clever adaptation of Susan Hill's novel better than the remarkable Robin Herford. He directed its first performance, and since then, with P W Productions, has nurtured and sustained its growth into a lasting treasure in the West End. He keeps the adventure fresh with a change of cast every nine months, together with a brand new stage management team.

So, as a new company, we embarked on our own unique exploration into this "heart of darkness" play. Robin's patient skill has been in encouraging myself and James Byng, my excellent co-actor, literally to "play": to discover and inhabit Susan Hill's characters in our own way, and to feel that we own every minute of our storytelling. Robin is demanding, but there has been a liberating ease in the way in which he has enabled us to take over the baton.

I can truly say that I have never at any point felt ancestral ghosts on my shoulder from any previous performance, or any temerity about taking over in this historic run. We had the luxury of rehearsing from day one on stage at the Fortune Theatre, with the props, bits of costume, minimal furniture, lighting, and recorded sound, with which we now perform.

Both James and I had learnt nearly all of the text in advance, which was extremely challenging, but made rehearsal so much freer. As a result, we have slipped into this production as if into a friendly old overcoat.

I find great joy in speaking and imagining Susan Hill's taut, tense prose, so evocative of the repressed manners of the period of the play, which draws you inexorably across the marshes towards the terrible secret at the heart of her story. It is little surprise that it's read as a GCSE literature text.

It's also studied as a GCSE drama text. Stephen Malatratt's clever device, by means of which the story is transformed into a piece of theatrical imagining, works as wonderfully now as it ever did: a pair of actors, two planks and a passion.

It is a brilliant structural retelling of the tale. Mr Kipps's need for release from his almost catatonic repression, by telling his terrible story, breathtakingly entraps the other character into the same state by the end of the play. And of course this is what also happens to the audience.

This has been the final extraordinary surprise. You can literally hear a pin drop in the lovely intimate Fortune Theatre, as each audience is imaginatively impelled to dare to cross the causeway, and on to the beautiful, eerie, treacherous marshes.

The Woman in Black currently booking at Fortune Theatre until 3 March, 2018

Photo credit: Mark Douet

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