Robert Goodale - The Man and the Woman in Black
In the theatre space, everyone can hear you scream. Any doubts about this ask the audience in Chester. ‘The Woman in Black’ draws from a murky well of ghoulishness lodged in that most scary of places – the imagination. Screaming (abeit in a Covid safe way) is expected.
I caught up with the show’s leading man, the actor Robert Goodale who has been living the life of protagonist ‘Arthur Kipps’ (is there an H.G. Wells allusion here?) for several years. Adapted by the late Stephen Mallatratt from the book by Susan Hill, the script gives Goodale a very meaty part albeit one served chillingly rare. I asked him about audience reactions in the screaming department. ‘It is strange, in some venues there are quite a lot of audible gasps and screams but in others, total silence,’ observes Goodale. Who leads on the scream dial? ‘Oddly enough places like York and Chester. But we took the show to Washington DC before the first lockdown and the audience? Not one scream.’ We mused whether or not real life US politics might have taken the sting out of dramatised horror.
Robert Goodale came to acting late in his career. ‘After drama school I got a few roles but decided to turn to teaching. Then at the age of 39 I took a show to the Edinburgh Fringe. As luck would have it, Alan Rickman came to see my show and afterwards offered me the part of Rosencrantz in his forthcoming production of Hamlet.’ That was indeed a turning point for our man and he’s been treading those creaky boards ever since.
Before ‘Woman in Black’ he had been touring an adaptation of a P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster story co-written with his brother. That show won the Olivier Award for Best New Comedy in 2014. A world tour followed including a run in India. ‘That was the best place from an audience point of view. Indians completely understand the language of Wodehouse.’
The current show coming to the Arts this week has achieved a kind of iconic status that few share (‘The Mousetrap’ is one). The play has always had the same director – Robin Herford – and generations of great actors such as Frank Finlay playing either of the two roles (Kipps and ‘The Actor’).
For Robert, this isn’t a star vehicle but one where psychological truth is paramount. ‘Kipps is a joy to act. There is so much going on in his head. This is someone who has had a terrible experience and has kept it bottled up for years. Silent but haunted and desperate to share his story’. He loves the format – the conceit that Kipps needs to tell the story but is unable to do so and thus hires an actor to help him. Thus both men become narrators and story tellers. Because ‘the actor’ is a character, says Goodale, it creates a fascinating ‘meta theatre’ landscape where the two men argue over how they are going to portray, for example, a pony and trap. There is then says Goodale, real psychological depth in the role which of course serves to unnerve spectators. ‘I have to say it is brilliantly conceived’, says the actor who shows no sign of tiring in his love of the part.
In our conversation we tried to fathom the appetite in a Covid world for horror and suspense. Could it be schadenfreude or a need to escape from one darkish world to another? We couldn’t conclude here.
I will certainly be in the audience on the first night. It may be that I can help Cambridge overtake York and Chester as number one City of Screams.
Cambridge Arts Theatre, 6 St Edward’s Passage, Cambridge, CB2 3PJ
Thursday 17 – Saturday 26 June 2021, 7 30 pm.
Matinees: Saturday 19, Thursday 24 & Saturday 26, 2.30pm
£20/£25/£30/£35
All ticket prices include a £3 per-ticket booking fee
Box Office: 01223 503333 / www.cambridgeartstheatre.com
