Like the creepy uncle you’ve always stayed away from at family gatherings, The Woman In Black has been terrifying for as long as I remember. 26 years if you insist on being precise.
The tale of a young solicitor sent to tie up the affairs of the recently deceased Alice Drablow, and forced to do so in an abandoned house amid misty marshland, first opened at the Fortune Theatre in the summer of 1989. It has been making audiences go “No, don’t go up there, why would you go up there, stop it, don’t… ARGH!” ever since.
What’s more, it does so with just two (named) performers and a wealth of theatricality that allows the fiendish professional fright-inducers behind the show to control every aspect of the atmosphere and your levels of chair-grabbing, random audience member-hugging terror.
Possibly the Olivier Awards voters have always been too petrified to recognise the supernatural long-runner, but it is yet to have a statuette to its name. The show’s Tom Godwin in the video above explains why he’d love you to change this this year and help it win the Magic Radio Audience Award.
The Woman In Black is booking at the Fortune Theatre to 21 January. You can book tickets through us here.