An Analysis Of Stephen Mallatratt s The Woman Of Black

Stephen Mallatratt’s adaption to play of â€Å"The Woman in Black† portrays the story of a man named Mister Kipps, who is a solicitor who has been sent to an abandoned home in the East of the country in order to collect the legal papers of a recently deceased woman. However, the audience learns that the woman living in Ell Marsh House was haunted by a spirit known as The Woman in Black. Being based in the turn of the previous century, the play tackles the themes of how the fear of the unknown can transform a man of science into a man fearful of the dark and every single creek; and how the concept of revenge can cause an embittered woman to seek vengeance and claim the thing she lost: Children. The play is set during the time where superstition was surpassed by science and where a rational explanation was being required for how everything occurs but how science can be destroyed by the unexplainable†¦ The structure of Mallatratt’s adaptation takes the form of a â€Å"play-within-a-play†, where the Actor (played by Matt Connor) is running a performance of the story of the Older Kipps’ (played by Malcolm James) story, where the Actor plays Young Mister Kipps and the Older Mister Kipps plays all of the other characters, other than the Woman in Black herself, and they are running through rehearsals, cross-cutting to various times in the inner narrative with a simple click of his fingers and lights up (Lighting design by Kevin Sleep). This cutting between times in the inner narrative and