INTERVIEW: Beware the ghostly ‘Woman in Black’ at the McKittrick Hotel
Photo: From left, David Acton and Ben Porter star in The Woman in Black at the McKittrick Hotel. Photo courtesy of Jenny Anderson / Provided by DKC O&M with permission.
The McKittrick Hotel, located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, has become a location for immersive, atmospheric and mysterious theatrical experiences. Their production of Sleep No More will reopen in February, and Speakeasy Magick is offering intimate sleight-of-hand magic to mind-blown audience members. Perhaps the scariest addition to the creepy hotel is The Woman in Black, a ghost story in a pub, based on Dame Susan Hill’s original novel and Stephen Mallatratt’s theatrical adaptation.
The play, directed by Robin Herford, involves the character of Arthur Kipps, who as a young man is sent to settle the estate of a woman living in a tucked-away mansion on the moors. What he finds there is grippingly terrifying: an apparition of a woman in black who haunts the grounds and eventually Kipps himself. In the modern era, Kipps is an older man, who has written his ghostly encounter into a play, and he employs the help of a young actor to bring the goosebump-inducing tale to a live audience. That live audience? Well, that’s the part New Yorkers play when they enter the McKittrick Hotel.
David Acton plays Kipps, while Ben Porter plays the actor. The two have been associated with this play for quite some time. They played their respective parts on a UK tour and also at the Fortune Theatre in London, where The Woman in Black has been running for many years. They originally set up shop at the McKittrick in early 2020, but the horrors of the real world canceled their theatrical horrors. Now they’re back, with the scares intact.
“It’s exactly the same team as we were doing it before lockdown,” Acton said in a recent phone interview. “But when the lockdown happened on March 12 last year, we all went down, went back to the UK, hoping to be back in October, then postponed and postponed. … And so now it’s great to be back here at the McKittrick, 18 months later.”
The setting for this version of The Woman in Black is unique. As audience members enter the theatrical space, they are greeted by bartenders who are offering different concoctions, including complimentary shots of Jameson whiskey. After everyone is fittingly imbibed, they sit down around a bare stage and enter the story.
“I did a UK tour of the show about four or five years ago, and you play to all sorts of different theaters — wide ones, narrow ones, tall ones, big ones, huge ones, 2,000-seaters sometimes,” Acton said. “The show works wherever you play it, and we know it can work in a confined place like the room we’ve got at the McKittrick. So we always knew it was going to work. Certain things have to be changed, and you have to make adjustments for that. But we always knew it was going to work. I suppose that’s with hindsight.”
Acton said he believes that the success of the play is due to its entertainment factor. The Woman in Black is not a political piece or social piece. At its heart, the story involves a ghost and audience members who become frightened together, collectively as one body.
“To make people actually jump and gasp together I think is very difficult in the theater, and somehow it just manages to do that,” he said. “And I think as well as the story itself, it’s the format. What Steven Mallatratt has done in that form of having the old man go to the young actor who then plays Kipps as a young man, and the old man plays all the other parts, that format just works absolutely brilliantly. I suspect it works better than Stephen Mallatratt ever thought it would do. … We just use our imagination, ours and our audience’s, so it becomes a play about theater. So everybody is there together, imagining what’s going on and what’s happening in the situation. … A lot of people say, ‘My God, it’s amazing how in this little tiny space and little tiny narrow stage you are in a pub, and then you are suddenly out on the moors and then in this big gray house.’ Everything is created in front of you. You see it.”
Acton said that teenagers in London will often see the West End production because they are studying drama in school, and ultimately The Woman in Black is a perfect study in how the theatrical process works — how a few props, a few billows of smoke, and killer sound effects can heighten the mood and transport the audience to a completely different location.
The character of Arthur Kipps is an interesting one. Acton sees him as confident and ready to start his adult life as a young man. He has fallen in love with a woman named Stella, and he has so much opportunity and promise. Then, a new job lands on his doorstep.
“He was given this fantastic responsibility going up north and dealing with the estate of this old lady,” he said. “Hey, he was going up the ladder, and suddenly the whole world is completely rocked. Everything is taken away from him. He’s left a gibbering wreck really, and then there he is 30 years later unable to speak about it, unable to talk about it, still haunted by it, and a very frightened elderly man who needs to tell his story.”
Acton added: “The whole world is turned upside down. He doesn’t know what is real and what is unreal anymore. He saw the ghost with his own eyes. He heard the pony and trap crashing into the mud and people drowning. He heard the scream. It was absolutely real, and yet he knows that it can’t be. And so everything is turned upside down for him. He’s a straightforward young man, a solicitor — black is black, white is white — and suddenly that reality for him is completely overturned. And he no longer knows what is truth, what is real and what is fiction, what is pretense, what is imagination. That therefore needs to be passed on as a cautionary tale to his family, to the next generations not to be blasé about these things.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Woman in Black, a ghost story in a pub, is currently playing at the McKittrick Hotel in New York City. Starring David Acton and Ben Porter. Adapted by Stephen Mallatratt. Based on the novel by Dame Susan Hill. Directed by Robin Herford. Click here for more information and tickets.
