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Andrew Liddle
Guest Writer
3:04 PM 23rd May 2019
arts

Turn Of The Screw In York

 
Elliot Burton and Amy Dunn
Elliot Burton and Amy Dunn
Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw seems to have lost its definite article in this adaptation by Tim Luscombe and maybe, just maybe, picked up in the process a bit of a modern pun – screw, screw loose, screwie, screwball, mad …

There is certainly a manic air about Daniel Buckroyd’s whole production. It meets us at first glance in Sara Perks’s self-consciously skewiff design, even before it’s augmented by John Chambers’s shock sound effects, the obligatory bangs in the night, eldritch screams accompanied by flashing lights, sudden gusts of wind, weird and spooky sibilances in the shadows, in short all the usual accoutrements of the well-dressed Gothic Horror story.

Billed as a ‘classic ghost story’, James’s novel is generally seen, critically, as in reality a study in madness and an unexplained evil so great it cannot be voiced. In modern times we might perhaps suspect it some kind of child molestation that James was obliged to remain mute about, perpetrated by two deceased characters, who if present at all we meet only in ghostly form.

Amy Dunn and Janet Dibley
Amy Dunn and Janet Dibley
Doncaster-born Janet Dibley wears an almost permanently haunted look giving a towering performance as the unnamed Governess who both narrates and relives a life-changing episode when, as a young woman, she was placed totally in charge of two vulnerable young children in a remote country house. The story moves seamlessly from the past to the future, allowing simultaneously suggestions of perspective and distortion. Dibley’s astonishing achievement is to seem to age visibly before our eyes, her features to contort with suffering and remorse. If she begins in gladness certainly she will find acquaintance with madness but does this come from within herself or from without?

Elliot Burton, Amy Dunn, Janet Dibley
Elliot Burton, Amy Dunn, Janet Dibley
The only help she receives is from Mrs Grose, the Nellie Dean of the piece, the ancient servant who has seen much more than she is prepared to divulge and who tends to swim with the current. Maggie McCarthy equally calls on all her stagecraft to animate a role that could easily become no more than a stereotype.

Janet Dibley and Maggie McCarthy
Janet Dibley and Maggie McCarthy
The boy, Miles, played by Elliot Burton, has been expelled from school for unspeakable crimes and does seem to carry round with him a strange threat. His sister, Flora, equally unlikeable and unbalanced, is played young and old by Amy Dunn. Both actors somehow commendably contrive a balance of childishness and menace and convey an unworldliness which is far from innocent.

Gradually, as the plot enfolds and the screw turns, the Governess begins to imagine she sees two strangers flitting around the estate and comes to believe one of them, a figure all in black, might be her predecessor, Miss Hessel. The other might well be the former servant, Quint. But since both died in mysterious circumstances, what she is seeing must be their ghosts and as such she sees her chief duty as to protect the children from the force of evil. But are they already possessed by ‘the others’ and beyond redemption, more of a threat to her? And, indeed, might all this be springing from her fevered imagination, her thwarted romantic ideals, her frustrated spinsterhood - is she really the evil one?

At the end, suffice it to say, we might still be in no position to come down definitively on either side. A jury might well be out an awful long time, mulling over arguments in favour of and against both interpretations. We can’t blame the messrs. Luscombe or Buckroyd for not further enlightening us textually or sub-textually. Henry James never did. And maybe whatever did happen is best left in the shadows, unknown and unknowable.

Turn of the Screw, at York Theatre Royal until June 1st (2019), is a co-production of Dermot McLaughlin Productions and Wolverhampton Grand Theatre.