The Woman In Black Portfolio

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The Woman In Black Portfolio

Martin Sutcliffe 11Pt

Response Phase

The Woman In Black

Arthur Kipps, a solicitor from London, decides to hire a profession actor to aid him in retelling a ghostly event that happened to him many years before and which lead to tragic circumstances to his family. In the cluttered, Victorian stage, Kipps begins to read his manuscript; slowly, awkwardly and somewhat un-interestingly at first, but the actor helps him transform the manuscript into a full blown performance in which he takes on many roles and narrates. The hired actor plays the somewhat younger Kipps, sent to a remote part of ---------shire (often used in Victorian plays), Crythin Gifford, to attend the funeral of and sort out the papers of Mrs Alice Drablow. Mrs Drablow lived in Eel Marsh house, a lonely isolated residence, and cut off from the mainland most of the time by the tide. In this house Kipps encounters the Woman in Black, a ghost seeking revenge for the death of her young child that was taken away from her. The woman haunts Kipps and a few years later carries out a curse and Kipps loses his wife and child. There is one final twist in the play, when the actor and old Kipps act out the play a woman plays the part of the Woman in Black, The real Kipps doesn’t see her so is oblivious to the fact that she is there. The actor sees her and thinks that she is the surprise that the real Kipps had said that he had for the actor, but the real Kipps didn’t know anything about her and in fact it Is the real woman in black.

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The Task

When working on The Woman in Black we were set the task of getting into groups of three and then selecting a section of the play to work on. My group decided to choose pages twenty eight to thirty one as we felt that these pages would enable everyone in the group to participate and also enabled us to show the audience many different emotions.

In the pages we selected, Kipps has been left on his own in Eel Marsh House and has just had his second encounter with the woman in black. He decides ...

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