Strange Happenings

In show business, it’s called a roll of the dice. It’s being in the right place at the right time, having the right answer when the question is asked. The odds of winning: highly improbable.

Such a chain of chance incidents has led to tonight’s West Coast premiere of “The Woman in Black” by the Laguna Playhouse.

Calling the play a “retro-post-Gothic tale,” Laguna Playhouse artistic director Andrew Barnicle said it is “also a paean to imagination and the world of descriptive theater.”

“It’s about what you can create in the mind through narrative and theatricality,” said Barnicle, who directs the play’s West Coast premiere.

Perhaps the most improbable thing about “Woman in Black” is that it has been at the Fortune Theatre in London’s West End for 10 years, a record second only to Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap,” which has been running continuously since 1950.

“The Woman in Black” is a ghost story, and a throwback to an earlier style. It concerns a London solicitor--Mr. Kipps--sent on a mission to a dark country house, where he finds the spirit of a woman returned to wreak revenge for a wrong.

The novel on which the play is based was written by Susan Hill, an English novelist more often devoted to what she calls “the serious novel.” How this book came about is the first chance happening in the chain.

After the births of her children, Hill took a break from writing. When her eldest daughter was 4, she considered returning to her keyboard. She had always enjoyed reading classic English ghost stories, and she thought a try at one might ease her way back to writing.

“I made a list of the ingredients of the classic English ghost story,” Hill said by telephone from her home in England. “[A] sense of place, atmosphere, probably a haunted house, weather. There had to be a real ghost, not . . . slime arising from the mist. It had to be someone who had existed. This was fun, but I wanted to make a serious point. . . . [If] there is a ghost, there has to be a reason for her coming back to haunt us. It’s no good seeing [a] headless horseman.”

The ghost wants to right the wrong that happened when her child died, to exact revenge. The result: “The Woman in Black.”

The next chance happening came on a sun-baked beach in Greece, when playwright Stephen Mallatratt, looking for something to read on his summer vacation, picked up a copy of Hill’s novel.

A beach in Greece, Mallatratt conceded, “is probably the worst environment you could pick, lying there baking hot, reading about an English winter. My flesh was creeping on the beach.”

Mallatratt, who at that time was concentrating on comedy and farce in his work, thought it was the best ghost story he’d ever read. He decided to step out of his usual genre and contacted Hill about adapting it for the stage.

She was dubious, thinking at first he meant to adapt it as a film. But for the stage? “This is crazy,” Hill said she told her husband. “This is not possible. Then, of course, Stephen did the adaptation, and it’s brilliant.”

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Mallatratt’s trick was to have the solicitor hire a young actor to help tell his tale.

Then came opening night on the West End, and the next chance happenstance.

“When it opened, it was such a very good first night, you thought, ‘Well, there’s something here,’ ” Mallatratt said. “I’ve had plenty of first nights in my time, but I’d never experienced that kind of enthusiasm from an audience. Obviously, you never dream it could last as long as this. It’s quite a freak.”

Ten years down the pike, both novelist and playwright try to take it in stride. “In London it’s into two generations,” Hill said. “People have seen it, and now their children are seeing it. And then they grow up and get married and their children see it.”

Budding actors have cut their teeth on the play. One, Hill said, “came straight out of drama school. . . . His name was Joseph Fiennes,” the leading man in the Oscar-nominated film “Shakespeare in Love.”

Through the years, Hill and Mallatratt have met and shared their wonder at the play’s longevity.

“We laugh because we expected it to run six weeks at Christmas,” Hill said. “We have a drink and raise our glasses and say, ‘Here’s to the lady.’ . . . When we got to five years, we thought, ‘This can’t go on.’ Now it’s 10 years, and we look at one another and say, ‘Well . . . .’ ”

The happenstance that brings “Woman in Black” to Orange County came when Barnicle and his wife were wandering London’s West End about 1 1/2 years ago, unable to get tickets to plays they wanted to see. They saw the poster for “Woman in Black” and thought it would be “boulevard claptrap. It’s been running 10 years, it’ll be stale and rotten,” Barnicle recalled.

“It was creepy,” Barnicle said. “We jumped out of our seats a couple of times, and we were both astonished.”

Barnicle held onto the idea of doing “Woman” at Laguna. He delivers tonight.

* The Laguna Playhouse production of “The Woman in Black” opens tonight at the Moulton Theater, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. 8 p.m. Continues at 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday. $19-$38. Ends March 21. (949) 497-2787.