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  4. The Woman in Black

The Woman in Black - Show Information

A solicitor is sent to tie up the affairs of a recently deceased woman. Slowly he pieces together details of her mysterious, reclusive lifestlye. Years later, he recounts the experience, desperate to exorcise the ghosts of the past.

Eel Marsh House stands tall, gaunt and isolated, surveying the endless flat saltmarshes beyond the Nine Lives Causeway, somewhere on England's bleak East Coast. Here Mrs Alice Drablow lived - and died - alone.

Young Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor, is ordered by his firm's senior partner to travel up from London to attend her funeral and then sort out all her papers. His task is a lonely one, and at first Kipps is quite unaware of the tragic secrets which lie behind the house's shuttered windows. He only has a terrible sense of unease. And then, he glimpses a young woman with a wasted face, dressed all in black, at the back of the church during Mrs Drablow's funeral, and later, in the graveyard to one side of Eel Marsh House. Who is she? Why is she there? He asks questions, but the locals not only cannot or will not give him answers - they refuse to talk about the woman in black, or even to acknowledge her existence, at all. So, Arthur Kipps has to wait until he sees her again, and she slowly reveals her identity to him - and her terrible purpose.

The Woman In Black treads in the footsteps of the classic ghost story, following the tradition of Charles Dickens and M.R James, of Henry James and Edith Wharton. It is not a horror story or a tale of terror, yet the events build up to a horrifying climax and instil a sense of horror.

The Woman in Black

Author(s)Thriller by Susan Hill, adapted by Stephen Mallatratt
Duration1 hour 50 minutes
Reviews"A truly nerve-shredding experience"
Daily Mail

"Don't go unless you like being scared out of your wits"
Sunday Mirror

"Prepare for sleepless nights!"
Daily Express

"A Brilliantly effective spine-chiller, it plays on all our primal fears"
The Guardian

"The most chilling and thrilling play for years" Daily Mail

"Imaginative and hideously real"
The Times

"Guaranteed to chill the blood"
London Evening Standard