'There’s a Lot of Screaming!' How The Woman in Black’s Stars Scare Audiences Every Night

David Acton has acted in three productions of The Woman in Black: in the West End, the U.K. tour and now in the new version currently running off-Broadway at the Club Car at the McKittrick Hotel. ”I've done it now probably about 600 times,” Acton tells Broadway.com’s Ryan Lee Gilbert on #LiveAtFive. “I don't think I will ever tire of it. It's an amazing piece to play, amazing to get those different responses every night. It's always a surprise—every time we do it.”

The Woman in Black, adapted by Stephen Mallatratt from Susan Hill’s 1983 horror novel (which was made into a 2012 movie starring Daniel Radcliffe), is running through March 8. It follows a young lawyer who stumbles upon a town haunted by a vengeful ghost. The play first premiered in London in 1987 in a bar and transferred to the West End in 1989, where it’s been running ever since, making it the second longest-running play there. Unlike the film version, The Woman in Black only requires two actors. Acton acts opposite Ben Porter, who also starred in the London staging. And even though Porter has done the play before, he still gets scared by what happens. “Obviously, I know when the bumps and the chills are coming and half the time,” he says. “I'm making them happen in a way, but still, certain things happen, and inside I still get a little jolt sometimes.”

At the McKittrick Hotel, audiences get to experience the play as it was originally staged, in a bar, to just 150 people. “It just works brilliantly in that space,” says Porter. While in the West End, they were removed from the audience by a proscenium stage, at the McKittrick, “we sort of move amongst the audience a bit more. So things are happening not just in front of them, but maybe behind them and around them. It kind of gets a bit more 3D.”

It is that personal touch that has enabled the piece to be scarier. The Woman in Black transports audiences from London to an isolated house in the middle of the moors just by using the actors’ words and viewers’ imaginations. “I feel like I go on the same journey as the audience,” says Acton, “By the time you get to the jumpy bits in the second part, it's the audience who make themselves jump.”

Despite the fact that Acton and Porter are making people scream every night, they don’t watch scary movies in their spare time. “I don't really go to horror films anymore,” says Acton. Porter adds, “Maybe it's something to do with being in The Woman in Black. We're sated; we've got enough going on.”

Watch the rest of Acton and Porter's #LiveAtFive interview below.