Robert Demeger on how Woman in Black promises to terrify the Liverpool Playhouse audience

Jun 2 2010 by Laura Davis, Birkenhead News

West End hit Woman in Black promises to terrify its audience. Laura Davis meets one half of its cast

IT MAY surprise those watching the creepy story unravelling around Eel Marsh House, in the centre of the bleak saltmarshes of early 20th-century England, that the tale was invented long after it’s set.

So far afterwards, in fact, that its author would have taken electric lighting for granted and probably had a microwave and a colour television.

Yet the world that the soul of Alice Drablow has just vacated – causing young solicitor Arthur Kipps to travel there from London – is lit by gas lamps and shrouded in mist.

He arrives in time for her funeral, the apparently straightforward task of sorting out her papers chased from his mind when he glimpses a young woman with a wasted face, dressed all in black, at the back of the church.

The touring production of The Woman in Black, at the Liverpool Playhouse this week, stars Robert Demeger as the older Kipps, remembering his past, and Peter Bramhill as the younger.

“One of the reasons why it’s lasted is the way the story’s told,” says Demeger, who first played the role in 1997 and is on his fifth run of the show. “There are only two of us in the cast. There are very few plays with two people in it that can fill up theatres if the two actors in it are not from Hollyoaks or EastEnders.