Now that’s what I call an adaptation
Awesome view from the Rylands Box because I’m fancy.
On Saturday night, I was at Cambridge Arts Theatre for a production of The Woman in Black, as adapted by Stephen Mallatratt in 1987 from Susan Hill’s 1983 novel, and I can tell you, movie producers could learn a hell of a lot about adaptation from this.
The play begins with the very same words as the novel: “It was nine thirty on Christmas Eve” but from there it finds a new way to tell the same tale. Just as the novel contains a meta element, with a first chapter which details Arthur Kipps need to write down his ghost story, the play too has its meta elements. It imagines that Arthur Kipps did write down that ghost story, but sought the help of a young actor to help his tell the tale, and it is their work on bringing this story to life as a performance that becomes our play. So our novel in a novel becomes a play within a play.
While the book only has the initial framing device, the play comes in and out of the story of The Woman in Black as a series of different rehearsals over a number of days. The young actor plays the part of Arthur Kipps, while the older Arthur Kipps plays (almost) everyone else in the story. It sounds like it could be a little janky and awkward, but it works perfectly.
They talk about the limits of the stage, and how it can be augmented by a sound engineer – and then recording are used to bring us London, a train, and time and again the pony and trap. They discuss how to make the audience believe there’s a dog on stage when they can’t use a real one, and when it’s necessary, it works perfectly.
With this additional level of the play comes another secret, announced by the older Kipps character early on, and only revealed at the end. It’s one hell of a powerful extra element. Having seen the play for a second time, it’s amazing how well this holds up. Watching it with knowledge is a real eye-opener in terms of how well this tale is crafted.
One thing that makes Susan Hill’s novel so great is the fabulous language, and her beautiful gothic descriptions are not lost, but used in the narration, and once more they provide what the stage cannot.
As I wrote earlier, movie producers could learn so much from this adaptation. It’s not about putting every element from the book on the screen. It’s not about sticking entirely to the originally. It’s about finding the heart of the piece and making it tick in a way that’s unique to that medium, and that’s what The Woman in Black does perfectly.