The Haunting

When this reviewer was a teenager, The Woman in Black was playing in London’s tiny Fortune Theatre. It was most terrifying, and the fear of this malevolent woman appearing from nowhere made this particular writer sleep with the light on for a full year.

Two more viewings and a decade later, this play still has the power to scare. So it was with excited trepidation that one went to see Hugh Wooldridge's The Haunting at the King’s. Adapted by Hugh Janes from Charles Dickens’ ghost stories, it has an almost identical premise to The Woman in Black. Set in the Victorian era in a huge, empty mansion surrounded by moors, outsider David Filde (Charlie Clements) comes to value the books of the house’s older, more sceptical owner, Lord Gray (Paul Nicholas). Left alone overnight, books start flying off shelves and mysterious voices can be heard, until the ghostly apparition of a young bride appears and the mystery of what happened in the mansion’s library unfolds.

With such glaring similarities, a comparison of the pair is inevitable. Sadly, this is where The Haunting falls down, as it doesn’t quite live up to the quality of staging or story that its rival boasts. What makes The Woman in Black such a powerful piece is its subtlety; a single light on the door we know the protagonist shouldn’t go through; the goose bump-inducing music box that plays on its own. Whilst there is some undoubtedly clever staging in The Haunting, the action is a little too explicit; it’s startling and confusing when the woman seems to appear from nowhere, but when she stands on stage in clear view and gives an overly dramatic monologue, any illusion that she might really be a ghost vanishes in an instant.

There can be no doubt that the ticking of the clock against the deadly silence and the knowledge that sooner or later something is bound to appear through the window creates an uncomfortable anxiety. There are occasional screams from the audience, but the fact that they are quickly followed by laughs highlight the play’s lack of psychological tension. For the famously macabre genre of Victorian ghost stories which created unbearable tension from the most miniscule of events, it is a shame that The Haunting edges too far towards the instant, shocking scares more familiar in modern film and TV than really exploiting the terrifying opportunities of theatre.