Many of the great discoveries of our time were made by accident (Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin) or in an unexpected place (Sir Isaac Newton's theory of gravity, inspired by watching apples falling from a tree). This was the case too when Stephen Mallatratt started reading Susan Hill's ghost story on a Greek beach surrounded by sunbathing holidaymakers. The result was a show that is now the second longest running production in London's West End after Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap.

Some time after Mallatratt's return to England, Robin Hereford, the then actingArtistic Director of Scarborough's Stephen Joseph Theatre, asked him to write a piece to fill a gap in its Christmas season. What was required was a show that had a maximum of four actors and a very minimal production budget. A "cut-price stocking filler" was how it was described.

Mallatratt remembered Hill's novel and how he had been drawn into her terrifying world even in the least conducive environment. As he said: "the initial triumph of the book, for me, was that in spite of all that (holidaymakers), it frightened." With the financial restrictions placed on him he had an inspiration to set it in an empty theatre, thus dispensing with the need for all but the minimal of scenery. The Woman in Black opened in Scarborough in 1987 as the Christmas ghost story and it was very well received. The small cast and minimal production values allowed the audience to use their imagination, supported by the soundscape and special effects, and to become complicit in the act of storytelling.

Hereford, who directed it and the other casts in London, later said that had there been a more generous budget "we could have been in grave danger of losing the essential simplicity and innate theatricality with which we currently tell the story." In an education pack for The Woman in Black, Mallatratt's "imagination carried him through the story painting the pictures of Susan Hill's distant coastal town, the eerie isolation and grandeur of the empty house, the graveyard, the marshes and the horror that pervades. Mallatratt realised that the imagination of the audience could work in the same way, creating a truly theatrical experience which Robin Hereford calls 'a crossover of mutual respect and acceptance.'"

The production moved in the summer of 1989 to the 432-seat Fortune Theatre in London's West End (after short runs at the Lyric, Strand and Playhouse theatres) where it still runs today and has been seen by more than three million people. A celebration was held in 2001 to mark its 5,000th performance.

A television movie was made in 1989 and Susan Hill's novel, as well as the play, are now set texts for English, Drama and Theatre Studies in the United Kingdom's national school curriculum.

In 1992 Hereford mounted a production in Tokyo, where it became a cult hit and has been performed there regularly ever since. In 2008 two Japanese actors presented the Japanese language version at the Fortune Theatre with English subtitles to celebrate the 150th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the UK and Japan.