THE TURN OF THE SCREW WRITERS’ THEATRE
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Basically, what James did in The Turn of the Screw was make wonders cease. In A Christmas Carol, Dickens insists on the supernatural reality of his apparition; when Ebenezer Scrooge dares to doubt that reality (“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato”), the ghost harrowingly sets him straight. But doubt is the whole point of The Turn of the Screw. An unnamed young woman, a parson’s sheltered daughter, accepts a position as governess at an English country estate called Bly House. Almost as soon as she arrives she starts seeing dead people. Not just any dead people, either, but the previous governess, Miss Jessel, and her evil/sexy lover, Peter Quint. The new governess is convinced that her charges—lovely little Flora and her rather more mysterious ten-year-old brother, Miles—are locked in unholy communion with Jessel and Quint. But are they? Or is it all a product of her increasingly wild imaginings?
This is a big deal for literature as well as for science. You can blame Derrida and a lot more on the governess of Bly House. James’s novella is a masterpiece of insinuation. Told mostly by the governess herself (in a written memoir), it constantly plays with point of view, dancing around the question to which you find yourself desperately wanting an answer: What’s going on here, really?
Thebus and her collaborators pack a tremendous amount of suggestion onto the Writers’ Theatre’s tiny second stage. In particular sound designer Andre Pluess generates a powerful uncanniness by means of his simple, vivid use of rain. The production serves the horror of its ghost story but doesn’t stop there: it also opens out into the greater, much more unsettling horror of its psychological mystery.v
