THE TURN OF THE SCREW. To 6 November.

London

THE TURN OF THE SCREW
by Henry James adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher

New End Theatre To 6 November 2004
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Sat & Sun 3.30pm Wed & Fri 1.30pm
Runs 1hr 35min No interval

TICKETS: 0870 033 2733
Review: Timothy Ramsden 16 October

Growing menace and fear in a vivid dramatisation.Years ago, having turned Susan Hill's The Woman in Black into a 2-person play at Scarborough, Stephen Mallatrat failed to work similar magic with a 3-person Turn of the Screw there the following year. Now Jeffrey Hatcher has managed the trick of capturing James' precisely carved sentences with their elusive exploration of feelings in a 2-person adaptation where Linda Slade's Governess moves from youthful eagerness to wild disturbance, convinced she's in a macabre, ghostly plot to manipulate two children in a lonely Essex mansion.

Moderneyes, a theatre company bringing American and British artists together, shows how modern James can be. The 1898 novella's set in summer 1872, over the period God took to create the world. Either the governess is suffering acute hysteria or there's a plot (which Hatcher's script eventually spells frankly out) for the sexual grooming and corruption of children. Only its ghostly perpetrators and James' elusiveness stood between the story and Victorian sensibilities.

From the start this well-acted production contrasts the governess' emotional warmth and the coldness engendered by the children's father, standing close to her but asking Have I seduced you? in a detached, stiff-backed way referring only to a mental aesthetic.

Throughout there's a chilling suddenness in the sharp verbalisation of sounds heard in and around the old house of Bly; footfall', dead-bolt'. And in the transmutation of a desolate cry from a bird-call to an expression of pain through the action. Slade builds her Governess' nerves and intensity to a climax as she switches from reacting to the children's manipulation into a plan of action to rescue them.

Eric Davies book-ends the piece with the neutral authority of James' narration, while creating at the heart of the action the outwardly calm housekeeper who knows of the past happenings when the spirits of Miss Jessel and Peter Quint were alive and around the children. And, crucially, the boy Miles (silent Flora his little sister is imagined on stage). Petulant, compliant, manipulative, this Miles is certainly a person in whom some conflict, be it the nature of childhood or the inspiration of a malevolent spirit, is raging.

Governess: Linda Slade
The Man: Eric Davies

Director: Anna Brennan
Re-directed by: Kim Crow

2004-10-17 13:05:56