The First 40 Years: 1987
This is part of a series of articles looking at the first 40 years of the Stephen Joseph Theatre (1955 to 1995) from the perspective of the theatre's Archive. The articles were first published in the SJT Circular newsletter.1987: Women in Black?
by Simon Murgatroyd1987 saw the world premiere of one of the most famous plays to emerge from the Stephen Joseph Theatre with Stephen Mallatratt’s adaptation of Susan Hill’s The Woman In Black. The background to the play - which is now the second longest running show in the West End - has been frequently told, but not how the SJT attempted to replicate its success.
Like all such break-out hits, no-one could have guessed The Woman In Black would traverse such heights. The small-scale, low-budget production was a late addition to the theatre’s 1987 schedule and no-one was prepared for its popularity; as witnessed by the addition of performances to the run and trying to increase seating capacity in the Studio at Westwood.
Little more than a year later, it would open in the West End where it has continued to this day. It is inarguably a theatrical phenomenon.
It is also ironic that despite this huge success, the SJT did not benefit from it. Although it has never been explored in depth - Paul Allen touches upon the issue in his biography of Alan Ayckbourn - the story goes a standard clause was missed from the original contract which would ordinarily have entitled the SJT to a share of future profits. As it was, the theatre received just £5,000 as a share of the writer Stephen Mallatratt’s royalties.
The desire to replicate the success of The Woman In Black is understandable and perhaps explains some of the programming choices made in the following two years at the SJT. The summer of 1988 saw two lunch-time plays in repertory both featuring key elements from The Woman In Black. The first was a production of Chances by Susan Hill - the Scarborough-born writer of The Woman In Black - directed by Stephen Mallatratt - who adapted The Woman In Black for the stage. First produced in 1981, Chances received tepid reviews and seems to have been deemed altogether too melancholic and depressing fare for lunchtimes in the Studio.
Running alongside it was a new play by Stephen Mallatratt - also the theatre’s resident writer. The Haunt of Mr Fossett was a comedy performed in the Studio about a medium trying to solve an apparently mysterious murder.
Neither play set the world alight and obviously the thought of combining works by the two people who had created The Woman In Black play was not as successful as hoped.
A more obvious attempt to strike gold twice is provided by the Christmas schedule of 1988 in which Stephen Mallatratt was given the task of adapting Henry James’ classic chiller The Turn Of The Screw.
Rather than being in the Studio, this was a main house, in-the-round production running throughout Christmas. It reunited Stephen with the team behind The Woman In Black: Robin Herford (director), Michael Holt (design) and Mick Thomas (lighting).
Lighting was not caught in the same bottle twice. The Turn Of The Screw is a difficult, ambiguous novel and did not easily translate onto the stage - particularly with just a cast of three. Reviews were less than enthusiastic and it appears the production did not meet expectations - possibly unrealistically raised by The Woman In Black.
Perhaps more telling is there is no evidence that either The Haunt Of Mr Fossett or The Turn Of The Screw received significant revivals subsequently.
The Woman In Black had been commissioned and produced by Co-Artistic Director Robin Herford whilst Alan Ayckbourn was on a two year sabbatical.
By the autumn of 1988, Alan had returned to Scarborough and resumed his role of Artistic Director. He made no secret of how impressed he’d been by The Woman In Black and even expressed a desire to see if he could similarly write a successful ghost story.
His true attempt at this would come in 1994 with Haunting Julia, but a little known piece from the summer of 1989 suggests he was seriously thinking about the challenge.
Ghost Stories was a late night Studio show (like The Woman In Black) written and directed by Alan; very little is known about the production as it was only restored to the official play list earlier this year after the press officer Jeannie Swales recalled her experiences with it. It concerns a woman telling the story of ‘The Fearsome Threesome’, three apparent friends who first meet at the theatre. As the story progresses, it transpires our narrator may be not entirely reliable - or sane. Jealous at the apparent perfection of her two friends’ relationship, she tries to poison it in increasingly alarming ways, leading to the pair dying in a house fire.
And this is where it gets strange - and possibly was a precursor to an unrealised idea. Ghost Stories is a simple late night show narrated by one actor on a set consisting of a chair and a table. At the climax though, the late couple in all their burnt glory mysteriously appear and disappear on stage.
To achieve this, Alan installed a pepper’s ghost illusion. Given the Studio’s small space, it was quite an effort to create a 'Pepper's Ghost' which requires a large sheet of angled glass in order to produce the illusion of people and objects fading in and out of existence (one of the most famous uses of it is within Walt Disney theme parks in the 'ballroom' sequence of the Haunted Mansion ride).
It’s an awful lot of effort for a six performance run of a low budget play and suggests Alan might have been toying with the idea of using the illusion in something more ambitious. He didn’t, probably because - as Jeannie recalls, who played one of the spectres - it didn’t work terribly well!
The fact that barely anyone recalls any details of Ghost Stories - even Alan couldn’t initially recall it! - and the Archive holds no information on it is more than enough to tell us this was not the next The Woman In Black.
The spiritual successor to The Woman In Black is arguably Haunting Julia which Alan debuted at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round in 1994. This is an all-male three-hander on a single set in which a father is determined to find out why his genius daughter commented suicide 12 years earlier - even if it means resorting to a medium.
Alan has said he was inspired by The Woman In Black when writing Haunting Julia, but got diverted from his intention of creating a spooky chiller as - as frequently happens - he became more interested in the characters than the need to make the audience jump. And whilst Haunting Julia is not an unsuccessful play, it certainly never reached the heights of The Woman In Black.
But then very few plays ever have!
Article by and copyright of Simon Murgatroyd. Please do not reproduce this article without permission of the copyright holder.