EVERYONE likes a good fright and this play delivers in fine style. At Monday night’s show there were screams, gasps and nervous laughter, and that was just from your critic.

The Woman In Black may have been running for a long time, but it has lost none of its puff and remains an exhilarating piece of theatre.

Stephen Mallatratt’s adaptation was first seen at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough in 1987, and came about after Robin Herford, then artistic director, asked the playwright for a budget-sized ghost story.

The play he delivered went on to be a great success and is still running in the West End, in which feat it sadly outlived Mallatratt, who died in 2004 aged 57. Herford has directed every version since and remains in the chair for this touring production.

What Mallatratt did was to preserve the thrills and chills of Susan Hill’s original story while also playing with the notion of acting.

The play-within-a-play structure reminds us that we are watching people pretend, that they are ‘only’ acting – and then the force of the piece makes us forget that entirely. Our imagination fills in the gaps and, when the frights come, makes them all the more creepily believable.

Arthur Kipps (Julian Forsyth), an elderly solicitor, stands in an empty theatre watched by The Actor (Antony Eden).

As a young solicitor, Kipps was sent on a hellish errand that crippled his life and left him with a story he needs to tell; he hopes the telling of it will offer salvation. His stumbled recitation frustrates The Actor, who eventually takes on the role himself, with Kipps playing supporting parts.

The play progresses haltingly at first, with scenes played out and interrupted. Soon enough, the story takes over as the young Kipps is sent to sort out the estate of an elderly woman, and to attend her funeral, during which he first glimpses the Woman In Black with her expression of “yearning malevolence”.

From here on, he obeys the foolish dictates of the horror story, and he goes where he ought not to go, in his case across a mist-wrapped causeway to the old lady’s mansion, Eel Marsh House, a remote and suitably damned location. There, he sets about reading her papers, even staying the night, when, naturally enough, things go bump.

A door that never budges suddenly flings open, the Woman In Black looms in an out of view, and a long-lost child emerges from the dark corners. And no one will ever touch a door-knob in a dark house in quite the same way ever again.

Forsyth and Eden handle their roles with thrilling confidence, with Forsyth taking on a number of roles, from the stuttering elderly Kipps to various locals. Eden travels convincingly from cocky naivety to haunted realisation.

Crisply and economically staged, with suitably jumpy special effects, The Woman In Black doesn’t waste a minute of your time.

The Woman In Black, adapted by Stephen Mallatratt from the novel by Susan Hill, York Theatre Royal, 7.30pm nightly until Saturday, with 2pm matinee on Thursday and 2.30pm matinee on Saturday. Box office: 01904 62356 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk