In its own, spine-chilling way, ‘The Woman in Black’ is the little play that could: the late Stephen Mallatratt’s 1987 stage adaptation of Susan Hill’s 1983 horror novel is the second longest-running non-musical in West End history.
But unlike ‘The Mousetrap’ (the longest runner, obvs) or the great ’80s musical survivors ‘Les Mis’ and ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, ‘The Woman in Black’ is a low-ish budget affair with a cast of just three. It started life at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough and rocked up to the West End’s Fortune Theatre in 1989 with relatively modest expectations and simply never left. A wickedly effective and suspenseful stage horror, its success was freakish but understandable: it’s cheap to run, the tickets have never been overly expensive, and perhaps crucially it’s always been big with school groups. It’s been part of the West End firmament so long that it simply felt like it would never leave – which meant the announcement of its closure this week came as a massive shock.
So why is ‘The Woman in Black’ finally ending its prodigious run in March?
The bottom line is that it is clearly no longer making enough money to continue – the producers wouldn’t simply choose to pull the plug at random if it was still profitable, and theatre owners ATG would be unlikely to be contractually allowed to kick out a show that was making money. Fair enough: most plays run for a couple of months at most; 33 years is the definition of ‘a good innings’.
The more worrying question is ‘why has it stopped making enough money now’? Essentially, we don’t exactly know, because no reason has been given. But we can hazard a guess. ‘The Woman in Black’ was famously popular with school trips: visiting it has been a rite of passage for many an older schoolchild, from London and beyond. And anecdotally, school theatre visits are currently in freefall, as soaring energy bills have led to schools reallocating their budgets in a bid to keep the lights on. With that audience gone or drastically diminished, the economics of the show no longer make sense. And upping the ticket prices is not going to help.
Soon enough, we’ll find out what the first new show to be programmed at the Fortune Theatre in a generation is: where one door closes in theatre, another opens. But whatever it is, the odds it will still be running in 2056 are pretty low. A part of the West End’s identity is leaving it, and though we can really only speculate as to why, it’s difficult to see it as anything other than a loss.
‘The Woman in Black’ is at the Fortune Theatre until Mar 4 2023. But tickets for one of the final shows here.
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