A English literature piece of coursework on the play 'The Woman In Black' - page 1
Keywords: In 1998 Mallatratt wrote of “the neverland we inhabit when involved in The Woman in Black.” By what means does he invite his audience into a neverland? How successful do you think he is?
By Northcott on 26/09/2008
Level: VGCSE
Page Number: 1 of 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5
In 1998 Mallatratt wrote of “the neverland we inhabit when involved in The Woman in Black.” By what means does he invite his audience into a neverland? How successful do you think he is?
Mallatratt thought that this novel had potential seeing as though there was a lack of ghost plays showing and have been shown in the theatre. He had a desire to bring The Woman in Black alive and remove it from the page: to stage it as a play capturing the eye as well as the imagination. Mallatratt believed that in order to create a sense of suspense and eeriness it has to be made in a way that there is room for certain images and noises of the unknown. However, staging ghosts is difficult – the film genre lends itself more easily to their creation, although, having said that, the way that Polanski realised the spectral dagger in Macbeth, seems amateurish in the extreme. The super-imposition of the dagger as Macbeth contemplates and musters the courage to kill the king and retain the crown is laughable. A definite example of how to get a ghost story wrong! On the other hand, there have been some productions of Hamlet that have been much more successful in capturing the ghostly presence of the dead king at the start of the play.
In creating his ‘neverland’, Mallatratt translates many of Susan Hill’s literary inspirations (and she is frank about this on her website): in the novel she tries to present a similar creepy eerie house as Satis House in Great Expectations while the idea of revenge stems from Miss Havisham and her desire for revenge on the whole male race (her ward is called Estella, while Kipps’ wife is called Stella). The appearance of the woman herself comes from Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. However, to realise these elements on stage, Mallatratt decided he needed to engage the audience more directly, as the imagination is vital in creating a chilling nerve-jangling experience. To some extent this is also a fundamental part of most of the theatre. The audience must enter the theatre in willing suspended disbelief, as this is clearly important in creating any successful production.
One of the key ways that is essential for bring the play alive and creating that all-important suspended disbelief is how convincing the stage work is. The main stage settings are for the Victorian theatre
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