Evaluation of the Woman in Black

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Evaluation of The Woman In Black

On the 26/6/05 we went to see a performance called the women in black with all the pupils who chose drama as their gcse. We made our way to the coach and got ready to leave. The coach drove into London and everyone was very enthusiastic about seeing this play as it was supposed to be scary and most people there hadn’t been to the theatre.

 First we went to the theatre where we were given a preview of how they used lighting and sound on the stage. I was incredibly interested at how the lighting was such a big part in a performance! It affected the whole mood of the audience meaning that the sound and lighting director can control our mood before the actors even get on the stage. This I think is vital for the actors, for example if the lights were very bright and you were trying to pull of a scary scene it just wouldn’t work or it would be very hard to pull off. But if the lights were dim or even on black out then the mood would change, darkness is a good tool to use, but used too often can ruin a play. Darkness played a major part in the play; it was used two or three times, but only one being used to scare the audience. This created tension as sometimes, nothing scary would happen when the lights got dim. Sounds were also used with the lighting to create or make you use your imagination on the stage. Different sounds were played, but I found that the best “trick” they used was the journey the main character does on the train. There is a soft sound of people talking in different cabins and the sound of the train on tracks as he sits down in his compartment, and suddenly incredibly loud another train goes past on the different track. The windows of the other train can be seen go past, to do this they had to cut them out and fix them in front of a light, to add the movement they made these spin on a wheel, this is called a gobo. All this we saw at the workshop and the staff tried their hardest to show us things without giving the story line or anything else away. Overall I think the technicians did an incredible job with the lighting so far, but I hadn’t seen their full potential yet, there was a lot more surprises to come.

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The storyline is about a man who comes to a theatre and wants to tell a story, what he doesn’t realise is that him reading the story from a book is the most boring thing for an audience. So an actor tries to help him act it with him. What happened to this old man was a story of a ghost. He was sent to a remote area up in the north to find out a couple of things about a certain woman, go trough her documents and got given her house and land. He soon finds out it’s ...

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