THE MIST IN THE
MIRROR.
Tobias Oliver Prepare to be scared by the Mistress of Suspense.
This month I’m looking forward to being terrified out of my wits. A ghostly tale by one of my favourite authors is being brought to the stage in a brand new adaptation that features the latest in high-tech visual wizardry to add extra chills to this already chilling story. In truth, I may never be able to go to Cast in Doncaster again without feeling that tight knot of fear in the pit of my stomach. Susan Hill is the author in question, a remarkable woman whose writing career includes more than 60 titles, from acclaimed literary novels, ghost stories, children’s books, detective novels and memoirs to a sequel of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. She has won countless awards, was made a CBE and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. 25 years after its premiere, the theatre adaptation of her terrifying ghost story,
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Photography: Joel C Fildes ©2015
The Woman in Black, is constantly on tour and claims the title of the second longest running drama in the West End (The crown goes to Agatha Christie’s classic whodunit The Mousetrap). What’s more, Daniel Radcliffe’s first post-Harry Potter movie was the 2012 Hammer Horror film version. Amazingly it is only now, she tells us, that someone is “brave enough to think of adapting my second ghost story The Mist in the Mirror for the stage, although it was first published in 1992, ten years after The Woman in Black.” Given that The Woman in Black is one of the most successful plays in UK theatre history, why have so few ghost stories been produced on stage?
“Yes, you might have thought that the idea of adapting The Mist in the Mirror
for the stage would have come up over the years, wouldn’t you? But it never has. I think people have been afraid to follow The Woman in Black,” she muses. It’s a riveting read, equally as chilling as its better known predecessor and very much in the mould of the classic British ghost story. Susan is very clear that she’s interested in eerie tales that have you on the edge of your seat, rather than shocking you with blood and gore, saying, “I very much steer away from calling it ‘horror’. It’s a ghost play, but it’s a genre some people don’t like. But the skill is to make sure it’s fundamentally theatrical and has its frightening moments.”
I, for one, can’t wait to see it performed on stage on the first Yorkshire date of the