Want a ghost story for the holidays? Head for The Strand
London hit ‘Woman in Black’ makes its Bay Area debut in San Francisco
Nearly 35 years after it first made its debut onstage, “The Woman in Black” is finally coming to haunt the Bay Area.
The original London production of the play — which is based on British author Susan Hill’s 1983 gothic horror novel of the same name — runs through Jan. 16 at The Strand theater in San Francisco.
Ghost story fans have been looking forward to this for a long time. “The Woman in Black” is a legend on London’s theater scene, ranked as the second-longest-running non-musical play in West End history. Only “The Mousetrap,” which opened in 1952, boasts a longer run.
Perhaps nobody is more surprised about the play’s success than Hill, who spoke with us as the show was getting ready for its debut.
Hill was initially skeptical when British playwright Stephen Mallatratt approached her about it in the 1980s. Mallatratt had read the novel on vacation and wanted to try to adapt it for the stage.
“He just picked it up at the airport and read it and thought it would make a brilliant stage play,” remembers Hill, who was calling from her home in Norfolk, England. “I just thought he was mad. I could see how it might be a film, but I just couldn’t see how you could possibly do all that on the stage. So, I said, ‘Well, OK, have a try.’ ”
Hill didn’t hear anything from the playwright for more than a year and had basically forgotten all about the project, when the script suddenly hit her desk. She was heading out the door on a trip when it arrived and didn’t have time to really look at the script, so she asked her husband to give it the once-over.
“When I came back he said, ‘You’ve got to read this. This is brilliant.’ ”
So she did. And she agreed: “I thought the idea that he had of how to stage it was just a stroke of genius.”
The play, which follows the original novel’s storyline of a ghostly presence haunting a small English town, originally opened as a Christmas show at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough in 1987 — a fitting location, since Hill was born in that North Yorkshire town.
“The Woman in Black” did well enough in Scarborough to get promoters interested in bringing it to London, where it eventually began its West End run in January 1989. The first few months were rocky, however, as the play bounced around from theater to theater.
“We didn’t really think that it was going to do anything much (in London),” Hill says. “And it didn’t do anything much, until they moved to the Fortune Theatre.”
The 97-year-old Fortune in Covent Garden seats just over 400 people. Yet, the intimate space turned out to be the perfect setting to tell a convincing ghost story.
“It’s small. It’s just the right size,” says Hill, who credits the move to Fortune as factoring into the play’s success. “We never looked back really.”
As the months turned into years and the years into decades, the play just kept chugging along at the Fortune, scaring millions of visitors during its long run.
“Stephen (Mallatratt), sadly, died some years ago. But we used to telephone each other occasionally, when we’d gotten some news of something,” Hill says. “And (the play) was just still rolling on. We used to laugh, because we thought, ‘Well, this is the thing that we expected to run for six weeks.’ And here we are — six years, 16 years, whatever. It’s taken on a life of its own.”
That life now includes crossing the pond — something the book’s author has yet to do herself. “The Woman in Black” opened at New York’s McKittrick Hotel in early 2020, earning several notable awards for its run. Now the curtain’s about to go up in San Francisco.
“I haven’t been to America,” says Hill, who doesn’t enjoy flying or traveling. “My younger daughter worked in San Francisco for six months and the older (daughter) visited her. They loved the place — except they said the weather was terrible.”
Hill’s novel has also had two film adaptations, a 1989 British TV movie with actor Adrian Rawlins and a wellreceived big-screen version starring “Harry Potter” actor Daniel Radcliffe. (Fun side note: Rawlins played Harry’s father, James Potter, in the “Harry Potter” films.)
And the play has made it onto the curriculum for some London schools, too.
“It’s had a great life with school audiences. They go to matinees and then they go back to school and talk about it, and they read the book,” Hill says. “It’s introduced a lot of young people to live theater who would not normally ever have gone. I mean, maybe they would have gone to pantomime — but that’s it.”
She says that some of the students walk into the theater expecting that they won’t be frightened, especially after all the horror films some of them have watched over the years. Then the lights darken and everything changes.
“You watch them just taken over by the magic that is live theater,” Hill says. “It just changes them. They come out looking a bit scared, a bit surprised. And they love it. I hope they go on then to realize that live theater can actually do things that the cinema doesn’t do.”