Woman in White
Playhouse
Wilkie Collins's classic sensation novel has been adapted for stage and screen many times, and has repeatedly proved to be devilishly tricky to pull off. It's complex, labyrinthine plot stretches credulity to breaking plot, and while on the page the reader is seduced by Collins's prose, laid bare in truncated, dramatized form it can come across as episodic and disjointed. So full marks to Heady Contact Theatre for producing the most coherent iteration of this seminal tale I can recall seeing. Given there was only four of them in the production, albeit aided by the judicious use of hats, glasses and accents, they did a fine job of presenting a story packed with characters, and played out over considerable time and space.
The central premise to the story is that the eponymous Woman in White looks suspiciously like Laura Fairlie, yet Joanne McGarva performed the roles with such notable distinction that it took me a while before my penny dropped that the same actor was involved. Ross Virgo was also very convincing in the dual roles of Walter Hartright and Count Fosco, to the extent that it was easy to imagine we were watching two different actors. Although logistics probably shouldn't be uppermost when judging a play, I couldn't help but be impressed by how cleverly this adaptation kept characters apart that shared an actor, without seeming constricted or contrived.
This was, in no small part, due to much of the narrative being shifted onto the shoulders of Marian Halcombe, nicely underplayed by Clementine Mills, who served as the lynch pin that held the drama together. Whether this was born out of simple, practical necessity, or a direct response to the novel's male dominated narrative, is hard for me to know, but it proved very effective. For all that Collins highlighted the injustices suffered by women, it is Walter Hartright that does all the detective work in his novel. In Heady Theatre's version, notwithstanding their respectful attitude towards the text, its notable how Marian Halcombe has been given much of the heavy lifting to do.
However, it’s respect for the text that leads to one of my few misgivings. Notwithstanding the skill with which the plot has been boiled down, there were still rather too many subplots and extraneous details to keep up with. Simon Rodda very much got the short straw in that respect, filling in with incidental characters that could easily been written out or around. A case in point was an isolated fourth wall busting interlude featuring his take on a school master. Getting a member of the audience to stand in for a pupil was quite a hoot in its own right, but in context it was oddly out of character and an unnecessary diversion that diluted the impact of his subsequent chilling portrayal of Sir Percival Glyde. And on a purely technical note, it was straightforwardly confusing to have an actor with such a distinctive hipster beard play so many different roles.
I think it fair to say there were a few misfires. The occasional outburst of song puzzled rather than enlightened. Why have Count Fosco chloroform Marian and then leave the consequences hanging in the air? While the division of labour suited this ensemble presentation, the lack of a clear protagonist made the action, and particular the conclusion, faithful but curiously underwhelming. My biggest reservation, however, came after having advised my companion to brace herself for a shock twist after the interval - an event that was a punch to the gut in the novel – it was presented as little more than a dramatic aside in this version.
Nonetheless, for all these minor quibbles, this was a solid, thoroughly entertaining adaptation that romped along. It benefited from a uniformly strong cast, simple yet imaginative staging, and a clear eyed understanding of its source material. This is a company clearly happy to wrestle with challenging source material, and the skills to pull them off.
