‘Turn of the Screw’ Runs Much Better Than Expected: It’s An Impressive Presentation

By Julie Stern

Unforeseen scheduling snafus forced Newtown’s Town Players to make a change in their fall program. The production of Moliere’s The Miser was cancelled, and on short notice, veteran director Ruth Anne Baumgartner was asked to step in and mount a different show. The result is Jeffrey Hatcher’s The Turn of the Screw, a two-person interpretation of Henry James’ classic ghost story.

Seeing it last weekend, I found it hard to believe that such a polished and beautifully acted piece of entertainment was actually a last minute substitution.

James published his spectral novella in 1898, in part because he was envious of the popular success of such creators of horror stories as Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson. This was an era of great public interest in “Spiritualism.” That is, the question of whether there really are such things as ghosts, and if they do exist, what are their intentions, and how can we make contact with them.

Being the psychological novelist that he was, James suffused his own story with layers of ambiguity and moral ambivalence that clearly separate him from his more straightforward contemporaries.

The Turn of the Screw tells of an inexperienced and impoverished young woman who answers an ad for what seems like the perfect job: to serve as governess to a pair of orphans on their isolated country estate. The only other person there will be the elderly housekeeper.

The employer (the children’s uncle and guardian) lives in London and has no interest in his wards beyond providing for them financially. His only condition on hiring her is that she must never contact him, or report any problems. It will be her responsibility to deal with them herself. That’s what he is paying her for.

When she arrives at her new post, the governess is welcomed by the housekeeper, and informed that the lovely little eight-year-old girl, Flora, does not speak (though she understands what is said to her) and that the ten-year-old boy, Miles, who was supposed to be away at school, has just been expelled- for “corrupting” the other boys in unexplained ways.

Initially delighted by both the children and the setting, the governess begins to have troubling sensations — apparitions and voices she isn’t sure are real. From conversations with the housekeeper she realizes that these are the spirits of her predecessor, Miss Jessel, who drowned under unclear circumstances, and a now-dead valet, a man named Peter Quint. She learns that the pair of them had been in an improper relationship and had “corrupted” the children by allowing them to see things children should not see.

The governess is desperate to protect her charges from the malevolent spirits of Quint and his paramour, who seem set on seducing the children toward unspecified evil pathways. James’ subtlety lies in the fact that it is never totally clear whether these horrific things are actually happening, or if they are instead, a figment of the young woman’s own imagination.

Modern playwright Hatcher underlines the Freudian potential here, by emphasizing the young woman’s imperfectly repressed sexuality (at her initial job interview she mishears her employer’s question about “your version” and thinks he is asking “are you a virgin?”). Her fantasies about a Jane Eyre-Mr Rochester relationship with him, the highly charged word games and conversations she has with Miles, and her persistent questioning of the housekeeper about Peter Quint (who emerges as a sort of D.H. Lawrence lower class sexual symbol) are consistent with the rebellious instincts of the innocent young maiden whose strict clergyman-father presided over her education and  confiscated all her reading matter except the Bible.

In this production, her character is perfectly interpreted by Marguerite Foster, radiating warmth, courage, and a sort of fatuous ignorance at the same time, sustaining the ambiguity of the original work. In the end, we don’t really know what the truth is, or whether more than one truth exists.

She is matched by a tour de force performance from Miles Everett, who plays by turns, the narrator (who reports to have learned this story from the diary of his sister’s governess), the mysterious employer, with flickering hints of decadence in his tone, the simpering housekeeper, and the overly precocious boy who teases and entices the governess.

Given an intriguing play to work with, and two of the best actors in the area, director Baumgartner has given Newtowners another of her impressive presentations.