Ghost stories are not about ghosts; they’re about fear. They ask what makes us frightened and what type of safety we crave. They also ask when is fear natural and beneficial, and when is it irrational and dangerous.
Richard Hilliar’s adaptation of Henry James’ classic novella is funny, fascinating, frightening, and entirely engaging.
Ostensibly, it’s a ghost story and, as director, Hilliar works multiple theatrical elements to create a deeply creepy atmosphere. Set, sound, lighting, costume and performance all combine together brilliantly to establish this mood. (Set designer Hamish Eliot deserves special mention: the creation of the late 19th century house and its surrounds is extraordinarily rich.)
Adaptation is a tricky business. The audience will always slot into two distinct categories: those familiar with the original text and those who are not. Though there have been dramatizations before, I would think James’ novella stubbornly resists the form, being so dependent on the subjective psychological experience of the protagonist. The original novella is in first person and the protagonist is the archetypal unreliable narrator. (Here she is played by Lucy Lock with affecting horrified bewilderment.) The achievement of the original text relies on silences, both deliberate and contextually determined. James’ narrator doesn’t tell us certain things, either out of self-interest or from lack of self-knowledge. And James himself, working at the end of the Victorian era, was presumably reluctant to spell out the more confronting possibilities latent in his tale. Hilliar’s version is much more explicit.
It could be argued that James’ novella is the culmination of the gothic, a tale in which the external supernatural and the internal psychological collapse into one. After The Turn of the Screw, modern horror developed because the genre had nowhere else to go.
But Hilliar creates a play and a production that engages in a fascinating conversation with the original, as well as being a deeply intriguing work in its own right.
Paul Gilchrist
The Turn of the Screw by Richard Hilliar (after Henry James)
presented by Tooth and Sinew and Seymour Centre
at Seymour Centre until Aug 12
www.seymourcentre.com/event/the-turn-of-the-screw/
Image by Phil Erbacher
Theatre Red 