Novelist Susan Hill never thought her novel The Woman In Black could work on the stage – before it went on to be wildly popular. So who is she to judge? She tells CHARLES HUTCHINSON, as her new ghost story makes its entrance.

IS IMPRESARIO Bill Kenwright a better judge of theatrical potential than novelist Susan Hill?

“I was the woman who said The Woman in Black couldn’t work on stage,” says the Scarborough-born writer, whose later book The Small Hand is now following the all-conquering two-hander on to the stage, visiting the Grand Opera House from Monday in the early weeks of its debut tour with a cast of Andrew Lancel, Diane Keen and Robert Duncan.

“It’s about having a hunch that it will work as a play. Bill bought the rights as he could see it as a stage play, but I’m not a screenwriter or writer for the stage. I know a good play when I watch one, but I don’t know what makes it work. It’s rare for a novelist to be able to transfer a work to the stage or screen because you’re too close to it and you don’t want to kill your darlings.”

Nevertheless, can Susan see why Bill has picked The Small Hand?

“To be cynical for a moment, people are always looking for a successor to The Woman In Black. Who wouldn’t?,” she says.

“But then it’s not my risk, is it? It’s their job, if they can see potential in it, then that’s what they can see.”

Could it become as successful as The Woman In Black, the Stephen Mallatratt adaptation that began life at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, when artistic director Alan Ayckbourn needed a two-hander for a December slot in the 1987 autumn and winter season?

“I don’t know. Who knows? You just cannot possibly know. It’s the magic of theatre. It’s the story; if it’s well told, it grips, and that story was so well told,” she says.

“But it was unusual for a play like that; I mean it’s only got two characters and somebody who does or doesn’t appear, minimal set, lots of very good lighting, and it just works. I think the theatre works because, well, it’s Shakespeare’s thing from Henry V, about ‘within this wooden O’.

“It is extraordinary and the imagination of the audience has to take over and I think this will be the case with The Small Hand as well. It expands your imagination, you have to work at these things a bit so you’re participating. But whether it’ll run for three performances or 3,000, who knows? Of course, the latter would be nice.”

Billed as “A New Journey That’s The Stuff Of Nightmares”, Clive Francis’s stage adaptation revolves around book seller Adam Snow stumbling across a derelict Edwardian house, having taken a wrong turn.

Compelled to have a closer look, Adam approaches the front door, only to feel the chilling sensation of a small cold hand reaching for his own. Soon he becomes overwhelmed by recurring nightmares, and in a desperate attempt to lay his fears to rest, he seeks to learn more of the house and its occupants, but the small hand is determined to keep him firmly in its grasp.

Susan recalls the inspiration behind the novel.

“It was something that had been in my head for a long time, because 15 years ago, a friend who was not likely to be spooked easily told me a story,” she says. “We must have been having a conversation about ghosts, and he said, ‘I don’t believe in them, but this did happen to me’.

“He was in a museum in Cairo and was going down a long gallery full of strange Egyptian artefacts. It wasn’t busy but it wasn’t empty, and it wasn’t creepy, but suddenly he felt this small child’s hand take his own. He turned around and his first thought was, as it sometimes happens, children mix you up with their mummy or daddy and grab your hand, but there was nobody there.”

What happened next? “The hand held his all the way round that gallery, but when he went out, it was gone, and that was all. But it stuck in my head through the years and I wondered how I might use it because it was so extraordinary. Then it marries in your head with something else; sometimes things stay apart, sometimes they’re like magnets, being drawn together, and they either work themselves out or they don’t,” says Susan.

Susan has never seen a ghost, but her friend’s incident intrigued her.

“What happened that day? It was a strange thing that could never be explained,” she says, but the novelist’s mind set to work on creating a ghost story, one of only four in her varied fiction.

“They seem to be what people associate me with now, which is fine. There’s something about the genre that just appeals across the board, from young people to old people, men, women, children,” she says. “There is always a story there, you’re guaranteed a story of some kind. It’s just a perfect vehicle, it’s got atmosphere.”

In writing such books, Susan’s desire is to “do more than scare people, which is just stereotypical”. “I would be unsatisfied if it were just that. There has to be more to it, and with Adam Snow in The Small Hand, he’s battling with something or discovering something. There is more than meets the eye.”

This separates the work from Hammer Horror thrillers, where the pursuit is as much of laughter as chills and thrills.

“What matters is the psychological journey that the characters are going on. On stage, the skill of the dramatist is to bring that out, to take the audience on a journey, because if there’s no journey, there’s no story.”

Does Susan believe in ghosts?

“Yes, sometimes. I certainly do believe in haunted places, I’m sure we all have a place where we’ve been that makes us uncomfortable, but as far as ghosts are concerned, probably 99 per cent of the stories you can attribute to all sorts of real things. But there’s always that one per cent; so yeah, I think I do.”

If her stories come principally from Susan’s imagination, her childhood in Scarborough shaped her too. “All the time it has an impact on me. Always. The place where you grew up, if it has any character or distinctiveness, is bound to influence your work,” she says. “It is imprinted on your soul; it haunts you. I dream about Scarborough. Scarborough, I think, is me. Wherever I live, Scarborough is with me.”

Susan will see The Small Hand once it has “bedded in” and at present is writing nothing as she is “running around like a headless chicken talking to journalists like you” about the play. “I shall start again after Christmas, but it won’t be a crime novel or a ghost story,” she says. “I d like to get back to literary fiction, as I like to balance what I write.”

• Susan Hill’s The Small Hand runs at the Grand Opera House, York, from Monday to Saturday; 7.30pm and 2.30pm, Wednesday and Saturday. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or atgtickets.com/york.

• The Woman In Black returns on tour to York Theatre Royal for one week from Monday November 17. Box Office: 01904 623568.