The Woman in Black: A Journey Through Liminal Horror and the question of suffering

“The person who cannot set himself down on the crest of the moment, forgetting everything from the past, who is not capable of standing on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without dizziness or fear, will never know what happiness is.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche

"The Woman in Black," authored by Susan Hill in 1983 and adapted for the stage by Stephen Mallatratt, has been a mainstay of the UK theatre, enjoying over thirty years of continuous performance. It has, historically, not had as extensive a run in the US, but from 2018 onwards the play has garnered increasing attention in North America. Vertigo Theatre’s staging of the play (running from the 28th of September to the 27th of October) represents another sequence in this resurgence. The woman in black is a child of the gothic horror genre, invoking psychological themes of isolation, supernatural occurrences, psychological turmoil, forbidden knowledge, decay and ruin. The genre emerged from a cultural reaction that had grown increasingly doubtful of the Enlightenment's promises. Also known as the age of reason, the Enlightenment emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, championing reason and science, issuing trenchant criticisms of religion and positing deterministic conceptions of the Universe. In the words of Enlightenment thinker Baron d’Holbach, “The universe, that vast assemblage of everything that exists, presents only matter and motion: the whole offers to our contemplation nothing but an immense, an uninterrupted succession of causes and effects”.  For Holbach, there was no escaping the iron laws of causation, the universe for him was a closed system propelled and governed only by the mechanical interactions of matter in motion. Any ideas around the spirit or a soul, were to Holbach, the psychological products of fear, ignorance and social corruption. The Enlightenment subsequently exercised considerable influence on several historical and aesthetic currents, culminating in a number of social and political iterations. Such a conception of the universe did not go uncontested, many of its claims were seen as a patent repudiation of human emotion, intuition and subjectivity. The dark wellsprings of human action could not be understood solely through matter, there was something else that primed the human intellect, that ignited the explosive spontaneity of human creativity. They believed that human beings were governed by an ineffable force, a sublime energy that transcended sterile explanations of cause and effect. They were adherents of the Romantic movement, an epochal rebellion that saw the Enlightenment’s claims as a violent denial of the human spirit, the collective will of human communities and an organic ability to shape reality. Gothic horror emerged from this environment, an anxious and brooding product, conceived from a fascination with the ungovernable recesses of the human mind and spirit.

Historical anxieties, born from the conflict between Enlightenment and Romanticist conceptions of the universe are masterfully interwoven in the Woman in Black. The play is set in Victorian England and revolves around a young lawyer, Arthur Kipps. The story is a play within a play, utilizing a meta-theatrical format. An older Arthur Kipps hires the services of a young actor to reenact a set of traumatic experiences, the storytelling consistently shifts between narration and the dramatization of his historical experiences, blurring the lines between memory and performance. This ultimately creates a sense of temporal dislocation and ephemerality. We are thrown into a state of liminality, a state of in-betweenness, never entirely sure what threshold we are entering into, crossing or leaving. The events begin with the death of Alice Dablow, where a young Arthur is sent to  the village of Crynthin Gifford to settle her estate. Arthur is warned by locals to keep clear of the Eel Marsh house, but business being business, Arthur proceeds to the isolated estate. The state of liminality we, the audience are thrown into, is encapsulated in the nature of the house Arthur resides in. A house that is accessible only through a causeway, that becomes unreachable when engulfed by a rising tide.  The dual state of the house reflects the transitional complexity that is weaved across the entire experience of this play, at the level of the characters, the characters playing the characters and the audience (us) interpreting those characters. Arthur eventually discovers the story of Jennet Humfrye (sister of Alice Dablow), the woman in black, who lost her child to an accident. Arthur through letters, finds out that Jennet was forced to give up her child to Alice due to social stigma. Jennet unable to openly acknowledge her child, descends into a state of madness when her child is killed in an accident. Her grief consumes her, and she eventually dies of an utterly broken spirit. Arthur is subsequently told she has become a malevolent spirit, visiting ruin and destruction on the objects of her malice. Arthur’s experiences in the house become a hyperspace where the unplumbable grief of Jennet takes on a range of figurative shapes and forms, some physical and some psychological. In this environment, we see a psychosomatic unity between Arthur’s mind and body, psychological and physical states are no longer held together through a mutually exclusive framework. Arthur’s body becomes a vehicle of searing perception; no longer a mechanical object in a world explained through the iron laws of empirical cause and effect, imbibing, through a sort of psychic osmosis, the infinitely tragic energy of Jennet. Arthur’s rational faculties are brought to the point of cognitive annihilation, he encounters what the Swiss psychiatrist Karl Jaspers termed limit situations, ones where the boundaries of rational and ordinary perception collapse under the weight of extreme or inexplicable situations.

This dynamic was expertly staged by Jamie Dunsdon (director), the surgical use of lighting, smoke and ambience created an expressionistic environment where we perceive, as active witnesses, the dramatic unmooring of Arthur’s mind. To invoke the idea of a parallax (shift in an object’s position when seen from multiple perspectives), Dunsdon through the exemplary use of the stage seamlessly shifts us between the increasing desperation of Arthur’s rational viewpoint and his deteriorating subjective state. Arthur’s general sentiments, before his paranormal encounter with Jennet (seeing the people in the village as essentially unenlightened and superstitious) bring into sharp relief historical tensions between Enlightenment and Romanticist claims. Arthur hailing from the city, epitomizes Victorian enlightenment, a world on the move, proceeding with a self-appointed civilizing mission, one where Arthur and his ilk are responsible for extolling and propagating the virtues of reason. It is no coincidence that Arthur is a lawyer in the play, modern legalistic reasoning, one of the crowning glories of the Enlightenment is rooted in a positivist (materialist) conception of the law. In such a framework there is little room for experiences that cannot be rationalized within the boundaries of inductive or deductive reasoning.

It is salient to ask here, at the cultural moment we find ourselves in, why this play has garnered more attention in North America since 2018?  Are anxieties, in the play, around the psychological limitations of human reason representative of our contemporary attitude towards the fundamental nature of truth? The term post-truth has been bandied about, used to describe a variety of perspectives; distrust in the political reasoning of the state, the inability of scientific systems to articulate the inexpressible agony of human suffering and trauma, the mobilization of reason to legitimize colonial brutalization, the increasing alienation of voters that have come to see the modern state (to paraphrase Kafka) as a cage looking for a bird. In such a world, the determinants of reason that heralded modern notions of the inviolability of the social contract have increasingly come to be seen as hollow. All of this calls into question the claims of the Enlightenment, or the modern project of reason, Jenett is the existential embodiment of not only this line of questioning but the rage, confusion and suffering behind it. It makes sense that she is mute throughout the play, for Simone De Beauvoir (French Feminist), language universalizes the experience of men, they are the privileged subjects of language. For women, not so. For Franz Fanon (French Psychiatrist/Philosopher), colonial systems are especially adept at using language to otherize, exclude and marginalize unenlightened subjects. We do not need to look far for political examples of this. The symbolic silencing of Jenett was exhibited masterfully in this production, Jennet could not speak for her herself, for her child, or adequately express her grief. No one was held to account for her suffering, there was no meaningful reconciliation offered to her, only a silence that reduced her to something less than human. This silence is subsequently weaponized by her, repaying in kind to society what has been stolen from her. As perverse as the idea that a malevolent spirit killing children is, one understands the magnitude of her grief, that she was rendered in the words of Jean-Paul Sarte a being-for-others, defined entirely by the shame and spite of society, reducing her to a vassal of silence and emptying her of her agency.

I must admit, at one point in the play, I was on her side, considering what had been taken from her I understood her rage, and her humiliation. I almost gave in to the idea that her homicidal resentment was justified. Her suffering at one point seemed to me all the moral absolution needed to perpetrate any scale of harm. Like a dark romanticist, only her subjectivity became important to me, it was enough for me that she felt what she felt. Her suffering had to be seen apart from the laws of cause and effect, how could that framework be adequate in understanding the true quantum of her suffering? Her dark sublimity could only be understood on its own terms. This, for me, was the true brilliance of this production, that a character who was silent, had little stage time except for a few ominous presentations and jump scares, sears herself into your mind. Like Arthur we are compelled to know more, we are drawn to this perilous mystery, if only we could speak to her, and tell her that we understand. Alas, we cannot, and this is the beating heart of the play. Reason and language alone cannot bridge the gap from intense anger and suffering to acceptance and resolution. Sometimes, nothing is enough, nothing will assuage the inconsolable anger that justifies the perpetration of harm in the name of suffering. The political and historical examples of this are numerous. The treatment of the Tutsi minority by the Hutu (brutalized by Belgian colonialism) majority in Rwanda after its independence is a stark reminder that sometimes the scale of retribution can far exceed the injustice being addressed. For the Hutus, no number was enough, every death was a re-enactment of traumatic events, a way to gain mastery over them. As perverse as this was, it was an attempt to reclaim stolen agency.  

There are two interesting themes in the play that, unwittingly or wittingly, draw on HP Lovecraft’s (stalwart of the cosmic horror genre) repertoire. First, for Lovecraft knowledge was not necessarily empowering. Unlike Enlightenment claims, for Lovecraft, knowledge could result in personal ruin and collective destruction, the rapacious collection of knowledge was not emblematic of freedom. Second, the universe is positively indifferent to whatever knowledge you have, there is no gnostic potential in knowledge, nothing in it that will avert whatever dark hand is waiting out there for you. Arthur’s discovery of Jennet seals his fate, the forbidden knowledge becomes the absolute certainty of his personal ruination. Unlike the Edenic myth, there is no potential salvation to be found after biting the apple. Intercession, prayer, pleading with the Gods will not guarantee redemption, in pure Lovecraftian form, the universe of the play is metaphysically aloof from our personal aspirations or realizations. It not enough that Arthur’s worldview changes once he leaves Crynthin Gifford, that he has been humbled by a stupefying experience, that he now understands the horror and pain of Jennet. In the worldview of this play, Arthur’s empathy is not enough, to either recalibrate fate or to avert the destruction of his child.

Arthur's embodying of colonial reason, and Jennet's dark subjectivity are both very problematic. Both proliferate injustice. What station must we situate then? If certainty cannot be extracted solely from logical truth or affective truth, then where shall it be found? I could not help seeing this motif being played out towards the end of the play. The young actor who Arthur has hired has started to see the woman in black, by all accounts he should not, he does not have the lived experience of Arthur, he has no direct encounter with her story. None the less, he has become a conduit for Arthur’s story, he has now been touched by the same evil. At the end of the play, once this realization is made by the young actor and Arthur, both characters look at us, as if to say that we too (audience) have been a part of that world. We too are witness to her despair.

The burden of Jennet’s anguish is now ours. We are allowed no catharsis here, no closure, in the words of Sarte, there is “no exit”. The play becomes a mirror. We are left to answer the question, will we perpetuate the cycle, or will we find a way to transcend it? In the final gaze that we are given by Joe Perry, we are left with only one truth, that it is us who must find a way to escape the intergenerational and transhistorical violence of our species. Someone must break the cycle. No one on stage will do it for us. The director has ensured that we do not leave that theatre with an empty sense of fulfillment, abdicating our agency to the characters on stage and expecting them to performatively resolve this for us. The complexity here though is, how do we address the causes of injustice that perpetuate, and re-perpetuate the conditions of injustice? Like the meta-theatrical framework of this play, we are compelled to examine this theme through a multi-order level of analysis, where does injustice start? Where does it really start? How do we appraise the nature of injustice? Through legal, rational logic or through a purely subjective appraisal of suffering? No easy answers are presented to us in this play.

I have deliberately tried to invoke the name of the woman in black, Jennet, throughout this review, to try to give the form of her suffering an identity, to refuse to otherize her as the woman in black. Jennet is more, so much more. Understanding her will help me in understanding the suffering of her victims, and in understanding the despair that generates recursive injustice.

Joe Perry was enigmatic, taking us through Arthur’s story with nuance and sensitivity, he was careful with his use of dramatic energy, playing the long game, never giving in to the impulse to be larger than what his character needed to be. This is something that I have deep admiration and respect for, this is a special breed of actor, one that puts a premium on the story and does not get in the way of it.  Andy Curtis was charming, bringing the sort of relaxed energy to the stage that only seniority can emit. He was effortless in shifting in and out of multiple characters, never being too affectatious, again just enough to tell us what we needed to know. He had a very special way of ceding the stage to his co-lead, I cannot quite describe it, a deep humility that comes with being a servant to the story. Though there was no metaphysical resolution in this play, no closure, Andy’s presence as the older Arthur gave me the impression that if he could make it, then maybe we would be ok. If the older Arthur was able to internalize his grief constructively and never sought to weaponize it, then maybe there was hope? Maybe we can find a way to deal with our grief, no matter how much it maims us, no matter how much it threatens to capsize and destroy us. Andy played that resilience with quiet majesty, and it is a performance that I will cherish.  The chemistry between Joe and Andy was never too intense, and never too dramatic; just enough. Jamie Dunsdon’s direction was brilliant, an expressionistic work of art that changed form, color and texture with each dramatic shift, again always putting a premium on the story. Her inventiveness in using the empty space, reminded me of Peter Brooke’s (British director) idea around the empty space of the stage, that what seems empty is in fact always replete with imaginative and performative potential. The production was awesome. Young Arthur during one of his encounters (either before or after, I cannot quite remember) with Jennet is rendered into an extreme state of fear, there is a moment where he looks up towards us and he is sheathed in a stream of pale blue light, potentially symbolizing the moon. Beautiful. It reminded me of the painting, the wanderer above the sea of fog. Arthur exhibits none of the confidence of the subject in that piece, but what he is encountering (in true romanticist fashion) is a terrifying sense of the sublime, and we are there to witness that moment with him. Another moment, when young Arthur is traversing through the house getting to the bottom of the mystery, the lights go out and he is compelled to grab a candle. The metaphor could not be any more obvious, this is where we see a psychological shift from Arthur solely relying on reason to learning how to rely on his intuition, it is the only thing that will protect him in that house. There were lots of lovely little symbolic embellishments that elevated the meta-theatricality of the story.

For me though, the true star of the show was Jennet, she figuratively embodied all the friends, relatives, family and people I have known who were brutalized by their suffering and could never see a way out of it except in legitimizing it through cruelty. Consequently, leading to the perpetration of even more suffering.

What I realized though, is that I am those people. I know how to hurt people. I know how to mask my suffering through cruelty.

I suspect we all do.

Rating - 8/10