Susan Hill, novelist<\/p>\n
When my first daughter was five, I asked a friend\u2019s daughter, who was a medical student, to look after her in the summer holiday so I might get something written. I had limited time before my daughter went back to school and having that deadline was a very good thing.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d always liked ghost stories \u2013 MR James and so on \u2013 but they were always short. Many are unsatisfactory because they have a buildup, then scramble to an end, and that\u2019s it. I thought there ought to be more than that. But it is hard to sustain tension and fear over a longer book. You can\u2019t just have somebody being terrified every chapter.<\/p>\n
I made a list of the essential ingredients, beginning with a ghost. I remember writing down \u201cweather\u201d: I loved reading ghost stories that began in foggy conditions. The setting then had to be isolated, a place where nobody would talk about this thing \u2013 a conspiracy of silence.<\/p>\n
I always write by hand. The medical student said: \u201cMy sister\u2019s doing a typing course and is looking for things to type.\u201d I sent her the first few chapters but she came back saying her sister couldn\u2019t read my handwriting. She suggested a Dictaphone so I bought a cheapo recorder and read into that. Then she came back and said: \u201cMy sister says it\u2019s going to be a bit slow because she is too frightened to do it when she is alone in the house.\u201d<\/p>\n
Inner-city boys have a look on their faces that says: ‘Go on \u2013 frighten me.’ In 10 minutes, they\u2019re clutching each other<\/p>\n
That sister was Jane Tranter, who went on to be controller of drama commissioning at the BBC. She still remembers it. She said: \u201cI could not listen to it because your voice got very sinister when it was reading certain bits.\u201d<\/p>\n
The book was published in 1983 and the play opened four years later in Scarborough, where I was born and brought up. The adaptation complemented the book: in a small theatre, it\u2019s like you are the reader alone in the house. I\u2019ve occasionally sat at the back of the theatre at a matinee and watched these inner-London boys of 16 with a look on their faces that says: \u201cGo on then \u2013 frighten me.\u201d It takes about 10 minutes and then they all start clutching each other. They change completely.<\/p>\n
\u2018My voice got very sinister in certain bits\u2019 \u2026 writer Susan Hill. Photograph: David Crump\/Daily Mail\/ShutterstockRobin Herford, director<\/p>\n
In the late summer of 1987, I was working at the Stephen Joseph theatre in Scarborough while Alan Ayckbourn was away at the National. I got to the end of my second year and found I had \u00a35,000 of the budget left. I thought I\u2019d do an extra show over Christmas and figured a ghost story might be a good idea. We had enough money for four actors and we could do it in the bar, where you can get 70 seats in.<\/p>\n
Stephen Mallatratt<\/a>, the resident playwright, wasn\u2019t terribly impressed by my idea but he came back a few days later and said: \u201cHave you read The Woman in Black?\u201d I\u2019m a wimp as far as horror is concerned, but this was a human story about a woman who was forced to give up her baby. I was blown away by it, but it had 15 characters. \u201cYou haven\u2019t been listening, Stephen!\u201d I told him.<\/p>\n He said: \u201cI\u2019ve had an idea about that. I might even be able to give you some change.\u201d<\/p>\n He proceeded to write an adaptation for three actors: Jon Strickland, Dominic Letts and Lesley Meade. The designer, Michael Holt, came up with the idea of using gauze: if you light it from one side you can\u2019t see through it, but from the other, it\u2019s transparent. It gave us one of the first rough-magic tools. It\u2019s embarrassingly simple. You can do an extraordinary amount with very little. I commandeered the bar\u2019s kitchens for my five Revox reel-to-reel tape machines, so we could do the sound without hearing \u201cclunk, click\u201d.<\/p>\n If I\u2019d had a decent budget, I could have done a super production \u2013 but it wouldn\u2019t have engaged the imagination<\/p>\n We sold out almost immediately. I put in extra midnight performances and there was quite a buzz about it. It\u2019s rare to really frighten a theatre audience, so it surprised us in Scarborough when people said: \u201cI didn\u2019t sleep for three nights after seeing your show.\u201d<\/p>\n A year to the day after opening in Scarborough, we had the read-through for the first London production, which opened at the Lyric Hammersmith in January 1989. Had I had a decent budget, instead of mopping up \u00a35,000\u2019s worth of local authority grant, I could have done a super production, but it wouldn\u2019t have engaged the imagination and wouldn\u2019t have run at the Fortune theatre in London for 33 years<\/a>. Since then, it has starred actors including Frank Finlay, Edward Petherbridge, Joseph Fiennes and Martin Freeman and I\u2019ve seen tough rugby-playing men cowering amid the screams in the auditorium.<\/p>\n