John Morrison

Before The Party

Post-1945 Britain produced millions of babyboomers like me who are still alive and kicking, but not many plays that have survived into the modern repertoire.  Rodney Ackland's play first saw the light of day in 1949.  So did I. Before The Party might have looked old hat in the 1960s, but in 2013 its distance from the present gives it a fresh appeal, rather like those bits of enamel kitchenware they sell in vintage shops.

The Almeida's excellent revival is directed by Matthew Dunster, author of the seriously underestimated Children's Children, who wisely avoids any attempt to wrench the play out of period; the costumes by Anna Fleischle are perfectly judged, and the theatre gains a proscenium arch and curtain, on which short animated scenes are projected at the start of each act.  As in an old-fashioned picture house, the interval is labelled The Intermission and the ushers wear period headgear and jackets.

But period charm only works if the play is good.  On this evidence, I wouldn't put Ackland up there with Terence Rattigan.  His writing blends comedy and melodrama, and although the plotting is skilful and the characters are well defined, the tone is uneven.  There is a tragic dimension to the story of Laura Skinner, the central character, but for most of the play it is hidden behind comic gags such as a malfunctioning doorhandle.  Ackland lacks Rattigan's empathy with his characters and his gift for subtext in dialogue. 

The tale of Laura is based on a Somerset Maugham short story.  Eight months after her husband's death in Africa, she is back in the bosom of her ghastly Surrey stockbroker belt family, supposedly still in mourning but in fact planning marriage to a new man, David Marshall.  How her husband died is the nasty little skeleton in the cupboard, and the play explores the way the family is unable to cope with the truth when it emerges.  Laura's parents Blanche and Aubrey are narrow-minded prigs, obsessed by their social pretensions and hypocrisies.  Laura's unmarried sister Kathleen (Michelle Terry) is vindictive, anti-Semitic and determined to ruin Laura's hopes of happiness.  Only Nanny (June Watson) and pigtailed schoolgirl sister Susan, increasingly upset by the dishonesty of the surrounding adults, redress the balance. 

Katherine Parkinson, an actress I haven't seen on stage before, gives a performance of real depth as Laura, and young Polly Dartford (sharing the role with two others) is terrific as Susan.  Michelle Terry, an actress who excels in roles that require a simple human dimension, seems slightly miscast as the evil golfer Kathleen.    The highlight is the big speech that Laura makes to David in the final scene, telling the unvarnished truth about her husband's death, and Parkinson brings this off brilliantly.  David (Alex Price), who served in Yugoslavia but threw away his medals, is the most under-written character in the play.

To a modern audience, the casual antisemitism and snobbery of the Home Counties middle classes in 1949 sound like ancient history.  Did people really look down their noses at 'commercial travellers' and object to Jews joining their golf clubs?  Was there really petrol rationing and was whisky really unobtainable?  Was the 'servant problem' quite as dreadful as depicted in this play, or was Ackland making it all up?   My source on these matters (also born in 1949) grew up in the Surrey stockbroker belt in the 1950s, and though rationing was over by then, she assures me that the world of the play is an accurate depiction of how things were.  The church, the Conservative Association, the golf club, the mindless keeping up of appearances were all much the same in that era of social conformity.  The attraction of this play is that it offers a window, only slightly distorted, into a forgotten period of English life.

The Thrill of Love

Amanda Whittington's playwriting career has been built on sharply written plays about groups of women, starting with Be My Baby.  So it's no surprise that her new drama about Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, is tightly focused on her relationships with other women in the sleazy world of early 1950s drinking clubs. 

Ellis's story was memorably told in the film Dance With A Stranger, and the problem for anyone dramatising it for the stage is to find a new angle on a fairly banal life.  Ellis shot dead her lover David Blakely in a Hampstead street in 1955, pleaded not guilty at her trial but offered no real defence.  Her execution was, of course, a judicial crime that became a symbol of the hypocrisy and brutality of the respectable 1950s.  It's a tale that requires the scabrous talent of John Osborne, or even Joe Orton, to do it justice. 

This production at the St James theatre, first performed at the New Vic Theatre in Newcastle-under-Lyme, runs for 90 minutes with no interval.  As a picture of Ellis and the other women in her life, it hits the mark very well, though I'm not sure it gets to the essence of her story.  The only male character is a rather ponderous detective, who links the scenes with narrative to the audience. Whittington deliberately omits both Blakely and Ellis's other fancy man Denis Cusson, concentrating on the feminine dynamics.  The dialogue crackles between Ruth, her ambitious friend Vickie, the world-weary club manageress Sylvia and the kind-hearted cleaner Doris, creating an atmospheric picture of early 1950s Soho.  Jonathan Fensom's design is all red plush and gilt chairs, suggesting a two-star nightspot where the alcohol flows and the tawdriness seeps all round the room.  The problem is that the backstage scenes between the women aren't quite enough.  The real story behind the murder lies in Ellis's relationships with men, not women, and they happen off stage. 

Faye Castelow, a diminutive peroxide blonde figure, is stunningly good as Ruth.  The direction by James Dacre is excellent, though I felt some of the scenes could have been taken at a slower pace. Robert Gwilym makes an excellent 1950s detective inspector, but I always suspect that when a narrator appears to explain what's going on, it's a warning signal that the dramatic action on stage isn't quie firing on all cylinders.  There are echoes of J B Priestley's An Inspector Calls here, but in this play the policeman is more of a dramatic device than a real character.

I enjoyed this play a lot, but left the theatre feeling that it was slightly predictable.  At no point did I feel I was genuinely surprised by what happened next or by what the characters were saying or doing, or that I was being taken into an imaginary world that opened up a new dimension. 

 

Facts

Never trust a man wearing a bow tie, I always say.  One of my other maxims in life is never to discuss the Middle East.  I do however occasionally watch plays about the Middle East, and I'm glad I chose this sharply written three-hander at the Finborough, which regularly proves that a tiny over-the-pub theatre space is no bar to dramatic excellence.

This is the third three-hander I've seen in the last week, after Mies Julie and Old Times. Facts, written by Canadian playwright Arhur Milner, is set in a West Bank interrogation room where an Israeli and a Palestinian detective meet to investigate the unsolved murder of an American archaeologist.  It starts with banter which sounds just a little bit too genteel and academic;  I don't mix too much with policemen, but this pair sounded to me more like a couple of Oxford dons.  But the dialogue crackles, and the playwright adroitly suggests how any conversation between an Israel and a Palestinian, even when they respect each other, walks on eggshells.

The play really gets cracking when the third character comes on stage, a fanatical Jewish settler who is the prime suspect for the murder.  The real conflict that lies under the surface is not the Israeli-Palestinian divide but the bitter antagonism between the secular detective and the religious zealot.  The story has elements of a police procedural, but the crime isn't solved, and the explosive ending doesn't quite work.  However, the directing by Caitlin McLeod is excellent and so are the performances by Philip Arditti, Michael Feast and Paul Rattray.  Milner's dialogue crackles with tension in the confrontation between Danny the settler and Yossi the Israeli detective, though by this stage of the play Khalid the Palestinian cop has found himself rather on the sidelines of the action.  The play explores the conflict between historical myth and historical facts, and between the detectives' need to rely on evidence and their gut feelings. 

 

Old Times

It's a good thing Harold Pinter wrote when he did;  his plays and screenplays would never get commissioned for television today.  Have a quick read of last week's Guardian extract from a book by top TV drama commissioner John Yorke on how to write a screenplay, and it's clear that Pinter really hadn't a clue.  If he was starting out today, he wouldn't even be invited to pitch an episode of Doctors.

In fact Yorke's rules, like those set out by other screenwriting gurus, make perfect sense for all kinds of genre drama, whether comical-pastoral, tragical-comical or pastoral-historical.  But remains true that Pinter, the greatest stage and screen writer of the last half century, broke the lot. Which is why his plays will still be performed 100 years from now while 99% of the BBC and ITV's 'original British drama' will be long forgotten.

Back in the much-maligned 1960s, before most of today's TV drama commissioners were born, Pinter's plays were watched on the small screen by audiences of millions.  In today's multi-channel world, the audience would be smaller, but it's still a scandal that the BBC today feels Pinter (and for that matter, Beckett or Chekhov or Stoppard) is too challenging for its mass audience.

Old Times, revived at the Harold Pinter theatre by Ian Rickson, only lasts 80 minutes, but contains more genuine drama than an entire year of BBC television.  On the night I saw it, Kristin Scott Thomas was playing Kate and Lia Williams was playing Anna (the actresses have been alternating the roles since the play opened in January). 

I had never seen Scott Thomas on stage before, and she's just as mesmerising as the reviewers say.  I found myself watching her intently even when the other two characters were speaking, determined to catch every nuance of her enigmatic face, every hand gesture, every inclination of the body.  I don't want to diminish Rufus Sewell (Deeley) or Lia Williams, but it's Scott Thomas who seems to me to be the ultimate Pinter actor.

Silence. Silence. Silence. Long silence. Silence.  Pinter's stage directions are famously precise.  But it strikes me now, after seeing Rickson's excellent production, how much space he leaves the director and the actors to interpret the play.  Sewell, for example, plays Deeley as a bit of a jokester, who compensates for his inner insecurity with a parade of irritating mannerisms.  And the geometry of three characters and three pieces of furniture allows the director an infinte number of spatial combinations, all of which give different possible meanings to the lines.  There's a passage in which Anna and Deeley discuss how they might dry and powder Kate after her bath;  Rickson reinforces the erotic subtext by placing the two actors only inches apart, as if they are about to embrace.

Not everyone, of course, has the chance to live close enough to London to see this wonderful production -- for which my ticket (admittedly with a restricted view) cost a bargain £10.  Any BBC viewers in the far west of Cornwall who think paying their licence fee might entitle them to a bit of Pinter now and again should write to Broadcasting House, which will naturally ignore them.

Mies Julie

I'm going to stick my neck out with an assertion I can't possibly prove: this show at the Riverside Studios is the most theatrically exciting production playing anywhere in London.  Mies Julie, written and directed by Yael Farber, is the latest in a line of South African plays that have travelled here in the last decade or two and set the London stage alight.

Farber triumphantly overturns the conventional wisdom that writers should never direct their own work with a production that drew rave reviews at last year's Edinburgh Fringe.  A reinvention of Strindberg's Miss Julie, It lasts less than 90 minutes and is packed with sexual, racial and political tension from the opening moments.

The set is a rectangle of dark red clay tiles, a kitchen floor over which an electric ceiling fan spins lazily.  There's a kitchen table, chairs, a cooker, a birdcage and sets of rubber boots and farm tools.  In this isolated Afrikaner farmstead in the parched Karoo, waiting for the rain, farm worker John (Bongile Mantsai) and troubled farmer's daughter Julie (Hilda Cronje) dance a ballet of frustrated desire that announces the story before a word is spoken.  The unrelenting tension of their doomed relationship is broken only by Christine (Thoko Ntshinga), John's birth mother and Julie's mother-figure and one-time nurse.  John and Julie are linked like siblings by childhood memories, by a common sense of place and roots, by their relationship to Christine and by their suppressed desire for each other.  But they are divided not so much by race and class -- this is the real insight of Farber's play -- as by a fierce rivalry for possession of the land.  Farber turns Strindberg's play into an authentically South African drama, packed with tension, violence and symbolism.  I'm no expert on Strindberg, but there's something about his writing that lends itself to reinvention.  I remember a great production at the Donmar a few years ago of Patrick Marber's After Miss Julie, set in 1940s England, with Richard Coyle and the mesmerising Kelly Reilly.

Hilda Cronje gives a performance of startling erotic power as Julie, taunting John into a sexual game that can only end in tragedy.  When she tries to persuade him to run away with her 'We could run a hotel' the audience knows that the dream of escape is bogus.  These two products of the 'new' South Africa are just as trapped as Christine, a product of the old apartheid South Africa.  Farber's play conjures up this unbridgable historical divide brilliantly, using the bold device of an ancestor/singer to patrol the fringes of the stage like a silent Greek chorus. 

I'm trying to make a list of the South African theatre I've seen in London over the past few years, from The Island with John Kani and Winston Tshona, to The Suit, directed by Peter Brook, and including The Mysteries and spectacularly original operas such as The Magic Flute and Venus and Adonis.  They have all left an indelible mark, and so has this one.

If I were forced to make a criticism, I would say the dialogue is a little uneven.  At it's best it has a sparseness worthy of Pinter or Beckett, but at moments it lapses into portentousness: 'A storm is coming to this farm, there is anger on the wind'.  But the physical power of the two central performers easily sweeps aside the moments when Farber makes the words too explicit.  

This play will run until May 19.  Go and see it.

Longing

It takes fourteen minutes of exposition before the samovar arrives on stage in William Boyd's  respectful tribute to Anton Chekhov at the Hampstead Theatre.  Birds are tweeting, the teaglasses and the cake are on the table, and the audience feasts its eyes on a lovely wooden dacha that takes up most of the stage as the characters tell each other things they already know for the audience's benefit. There are enough birch trees to build a raft and float across the Volga, autumn leaves littering the grass, and some soulful music.  All that is missing is a pickled mushroom or two. It's familiar territory for anyone who has seen Chekhov's great plays, with echoes of The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard ever-present.

And that's the problem.  By fashioning a Chekhovian play out of two short stories, Boyd has entered a contest he just cannot win.  If Chekhov had never written any plays but stuck to prose fiction, this reverential pastiche might qualify as a creditable attempt to put the master's work on stage.  But he did, and anyone who knows the plays will find themselves making comparisons to Boyd's disadvantage.

I agree that Chekhov deserves total respect in the theatre, which is why Andrew Upton's mangled version of The Cherry Orchard so annoyed me at the National Theatre.  Here he gets it, but it's not enough. Boyd sticks very firmly to the right historical period, and Nina Raine's direction and Lizzie Clachan's design maintain the correct Russian atmosphere.  The acting is excellent throughout, with Tamsin Greig as Varia, a spinsterish, cigarette-smoking doctor, Iain Glen as Kolya, a commitment-phobic Moscow lawyer, John Sessions as Dolzhikov, a vigorous self-made man of humble origins, and Natasha Little as Tania, the wife of a man who drinks and fritters away her family estate.

The dacha or summerhouse is just one corner of the estate which the bibulous Sergei (Alan Cox) has mortgaged to the banks.  Unless Kolya can work a miracle, the banks will foreclose and the estate will be sold off. It's all very like The Cherry Orchard, with Dolzhikov as a forerunner of Lopakhin, the man who buys Ranevskaya's bankrupt estate and chops down the trees.  In Boyd's play there is a sub-plot, cleverly crafted from the second of Chekhov's stories. The house-painter's mate who is up on the roof of the dacha turns out to be a middle-class architect's son who is trying to turn his back on privilege and earn an honest living with his hands.  Misail (William Postlethwaite) is potentially the most interesting character in the play;  his dilemma is that he is engaged to Kleopatra, the pushy daughter of Dolzhikov, who plans to install them both in the big house when he buys the property.  Kleopatra is a predecessor of the vulgar Natasha who displaces the middle-class sisterhood in Three Sisters.  Misail, unfortunately, can't escape from her clutches although he has fallen in love with the lovely young Natasha (Eve Ponsonby), younger sister of Tania, who in turn is in love with Kolya. Everyone, in other words, is unhappy in true Chekhovian style.

Boyd captures some aspects of Chekhov's stagecraft -- the moments where characters have happiness in sight but fail to grab it --  but not others.  He can manage scenes for two or three people, but misses the rich symphony of Chekhov's big scenes, where characters float in and out of the action, talking ridiculous non-sequiturs.  He lacks Chekhov's surgical skill in laying bare the characters' absurd self-delusions, opting instead to make most of them quite sympathetic. The exceptions are Dolzhikov, who remains something of a caricature where Lopakhin is a feeling human being, and the drunken Sergei, who lacks any of the feckless charm of Chekhov's failures, such as Uncle Vanya.  The comedy is too gentle to be really funny, and the dialogue above all lacks subtext.  When Chekhov's characters are unhappy, they generally say they are happy.  Boyd's characters, unfortunately, tend to just say they are unhappy.  It's all too much 'on the nose'.

In terms of pace and dramatic action, the play struggles to get out of second gear.  The first act climaxes with one character hitting another in the face, but this incident has no real consequences in the second act or on the outcome of the play.  The loss of the estate, as in the Cherry Orchard, happens off stage, but whereas Chekhov generates real tension, leading up to Lophakhin's arrival, here it is an entirely predictable non-event.  At the end, Kolya hides in the shrubbery to reject the advances of the lovesick young Natasha.  This could be a really Chekhovian scene of borderline farce, but Boyd lacks the ruthlessness of Chekhov in making his characters ridiculous;  instead we are just asked to sympathise with them, and it's not enough.

If it hadn't been for the fact that I was unable to rent or buy a dacha in Russia in the 1980s, I might well have stayed there longer. The Hampstead Theatre's dacha is beautiful and If my garden was big enough, I would put in a bid for it at the end of the run.  But this summer house (which might have furnished a better title for the play) never acquires the emotional resonance of Chekhov's off-stage orchard as a symbol of a way of life being destroyed.  Despite the long exposition at the beginning, it's unclear (at least it was to me) how Kolya is connected to Varia, Tania and Natasha. I initially assumed he was their brother, and they were three sisters. I think I was mistaken in both cases, but even at the end of the play I was still a bit in the dark about the backstory and the family circumstances.  Chekhov, by contrast, is always pin-sharp in his exposition of who is linked to whom and their mutual dependencies.

This is the sort of play that is pleasant enough to fill the stalls on a damp afternoon in the West End or at the Yvonne Arnaud theatre in Guildford, where nothing too challenging is expected.  It's an interesting experiment in fan fiction.  But it left me impatient to get back to the real thing.  Nina Raine is obviously an excellent director, and if she gets to work on a real Chekhov play, I will be first in the queue for a ticket.

One pedantic point:  if you are unfortunate enough to share a first name with the Russian president, you will know that the stress on Vladimir falls not on the first syllable but the second.  For guidance, see my ever-popular guide to pronouncing Chekhov's names. 

Last night's performance was disrupted by three un-Chekhovian mobile phones going off.  If theatres don't like playing a recorded announcement reminding audiences to switch off, they should display notices or, even better, get the ushers to give a verbal reminder.  That seems to work at the Donmar and I think Hampstead Theatre could usefully follow suit.

The Captain of Kopenick

'I'm in a coffee grinder', exclaims the hapless ex-jailbird Wilhelm Voigt.  After watching the endless revolving Olivier theatre stage, I know exactly how he feels.  In Adrian Noble's frenetically cartoonish production of Carl Zuckmayer's play, the stage spins and spins and spins every few minutes, with cavernous holes appearing just where the actors are about to plant their feet.  It is simultaneously banal and distracting, and it sums up what is wrong with this show.

The National Theatre seems to have a problem with the early 20th century European theatre repertoire; when it does engage, it seems to plunder the catalogue for raw material rather than showing the kind of respect it shows for English-language playwrights of the same period, such as Shaw.  I've complained often enough about the way classic Russian texts by Gorky, Bulgakov and even Chekhov have been mangled, and it seems that the same theatrical double standard has now been applied to Zuckmayer as well.  I'm not familiar with the original text, but it's fairly clear that Noble and his rewrite man Ron Hutchinson don't have much confidence in it.  The result is a rather unfunny vaudeville from which all the subtleties have been extracted.  Noble has directed lots of musicals, and it shows in the style he applies here, which seems to owe a lot to Les Miserables.  There are lots of moments when the characters appear to be about to burst into song, and just occasionally they do so.

Visually, it has its good points.  Noble hasn't been tempted to fiddle around with the period, and leaves the story in the pre-1914 of the Kaiser's Berlin, where the mere possession of a military uniform could turn a down-and-out ex-con into a man of substance. The music in the style of Weill and the modernist backdrop suggest more the late 1920s when Zuckmayer wrote the play.  It's easy to poke fun at Prussian militarism with its uniforms and funny helmets with spikes on top, but the satire lacks any contemporary bite.  What this show lacks is a clever reinvention of the kind that David Farr applied to Gogol's Government Inspector a decade or so ago.  That show had the wonderful Michael Sheen as a Foxton's estate agent who sows mayhem in a corrupt former Soviet-bloc state when he is mistaken for a U.N. investigator.  That production was extremely funny, but this one never gets beyond the mildly amusing.  Its humour, relying on Keystone Cops routines and cartoonish stereotypes, never finds the comic nerve.

The one person who emerges with great credit is Antony Sher, playing Voigt.  He turns the ex-prisoner into a rounded individual who, unlike most of the people around him, shows real compassion.  The moment when Voigt dons a military uniform doesn't come until after the interval -- structurally too late.  Sher is a joy to watch as he suddenly discovers the power of his new clothes,  shifting in seconds from modest deference and abject submission to an authoritarian bark. 

But he and his fellow actors struggle to make an impact, hemmed in as they are by Anthony Ward's over-obtrusive set, particularly in the climactic scene where Voigt and his military patrol occupy the town hall.  There are so many staircases crammed into a small space that a scene which demands lots of movement feels cramped and limited.  Like the RSC, the National suffers from a rigid system in which the set has to be designed weeks before the cast get into rehearsals;  the actors are imprisoned by the set rather than liberated by it.  Gigantic big-budget stage sets are generally unneccessary, especially when they leave the audience no space to exercise their collective imagination.  As for the revolve, in my view it is least effective when used a simple scene-changing device;  when it is used sparingly, it can have a great effect.

Feast at the Young Vic

Multiple authorship in the theatre can work brilliantly, illustrating different facets of a single theme, as it did for Rupert Goold's exploration of the 9/11 attack, Decade.  But the risk of engaging several writers is that the focus becomes too diffuse and the whole is less than the sum of the parts.

This show directed by Rufus Norris at the Young Vic is a co-production with the Royal Court and has been several years in gestation.  It uses some of the most stunning designs and visual effects I have ever seen on stage and a tip-top cast to explore Yoruba culture, not so much in Nigeria but in the post-slavery diaspora.  The music, the dance, the costumes, the lighting and the acting are all breathtakingly good, but the words rarely reach the same level.  The five writers employed hail from as far away as Cuba, Brazil and the US as well as the UK.  Some of the individual scenes work better than others, notably a plantation owner dismissing the woman who was once his wet-nurse on the day Brazil abolishes slavery in the 1880s, and a lunch counter sit-in during the U.S. civil rights protests of the early 1960s.  We also see an American tourist visiting a Cuban prostitute and a young black British woman athlete suffering peer pressure on the streets of South London.  But many of these scenes are too long and don't really go anywhere, and the common thread linking them isn't strong enough. I would have welcomed more focus on present-day Africa to bind the diaspora scenes together.

With this kind of project, too much time and work has been invested to allow the director the freedom to be absolutely ruthless on behalf of the audience in cutting and reshaping the show.  This is not to diminish the performances by Noma Dumezweni, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith and others.  The design by Katrina Lindsay, with the help of projections by Lysander Ashton's 59 Productions, which also worked on the Olympics opening ceremony, should win a fistful of awards.  The best moments are when little or nothing is said and the show relies on its visual impact and the actors' movements.

Our Country's Good

I must be one of the last people in the country never to have seen this classic play on stage.  My excuse for missing the original production of Timberlake Wertenbaker's hit play at the Royal Court in the late 1980s was my transportation abroad to a five-year sentence in a particularly harsh penal colony.  No, not Sydney or Botany Bay, but Brezhnev-era Moscow.

Max Stafford-Clark, who directed it first time around, has revived the play some 25 years on and it comes up fresh as a daisy.  My delight at seeing it was doubled by remembering Josie Rourke's luminous and moving production of  The Recruiting Officer at the Donmar in 2012. As the programme at the new St James Theatre reminds us, the original brainwave of basing a play on Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker was Stafford-Clark's.  Wertenbaker wrote the play after the Royal Court actors developed his concept in workshops.

The play that resulted is a terrific piece of work that really has stood the test of time, showing the struggle between the emancipating power of theatre and the relentless violence and brutality of the colonial setting.  The deported convicts discover a common humanity as they rehearse and perform George Farquhar's bitter comedy about men in red coats and their love life, thousands of miles away from home. 

It's a gripping production by a well-balanced ensemble cast, my only reservation being that the erotic attraction between Lieutenant Ralph Clark, the director, and his leading lady Mary Brenham, seems somewhat underplayed. 

The St James Theatre is an unsubsidised 312-seat auditorium, and the ticket prices are accordingly steepish;   I hesitated a bit before spending £35 a ticket to see this, but I can confidently say it's worth every penny.  At last night's preview it was good to see in the audience not only the author but one of the stars of the original production, Ron Cook.

The Turn of the Screw at the Almeida

Henry James' The Turn of the Screw is known as a ghost story; it isn't.  It uses the classic framing device of a Victorian ghost tale -- the rapt after-dinner audience, the manuscript confession locked in a drawer -- to explore something much more modern. James, like Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, is exploring the idea of the Unreliable Narrator.  The unnamed woman telling the story of her haunting is self-aware, but lacks any real hindsight into her delusional narrative.  The reader sees the story entirely through her eyes as the story spirals onwards through the clinging loops and arabesques of James's late Victorian prose.  All the way through, the author plants a layer of subtext which can be glimpsed, like a ghost through a dirty windowpane.  It's subtle and ambiguous.

Unfortunately none of this ambiguity and subtlety finds its way into the Almeida's adaptation, written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, which substitutes the painfully obvious at every turn for the ambivalence of James's story.  The involvement in the production of Hammer Theatre of Horror shows this is a straight attempt to do what The Woman in Black has been doing in the West End for more than a decade -- chilling spines.  Yes, there were a couple of moments when my spine was chilled, as were the spines of the sixth-formers sitting around me.  Well, good luck to the Almeida in putting bums on seats with spooky music, stage lighting effects, a Gothic set, screaming fox noises and projected images of bats circling.

I have to say the acting is impeccable, with Anna Madeley as the governess, Gemma Jones as the housekeeper, and terrific performances by 10-year-old Emilia Jones (one of three young actresses) as Flora and Laurence Belcher as Miles.  Lindsay Posner the director plays up the creepiness at the expense of the psychology, but this is inevitable giving the one-dimensional nature of the script.  Rebecca Lenkiewicz is best known for Her Naked Skin, a drama about suffragettes which played at the National Theatre in 2008 and which I thought fell short on several fronts.  I have no problem with her recognition that James's novella had to be adapted to make the transition from page to stage;  in fact I think a bolder, more psychological modernisation of the story of the haunted governess might have worked better.

The changes she has made to the story seem to me to be either unneccessary, or misguided.  The principal one is to change Miles from a young boy into a post-pubertal adolescent whose sexual feelings for his governess seem to be reciprocated.  Critics have long debated the sexual subtext of the original story, but this adaptation pushes the erotic element right into the foreground.  Miles, it appears, has been traumatised by seeing Peter Quint the dead manservant and Miss Jessel the dead governess shagging away in the bushes.  This may seem very dramatic, but it undermines one of the key underpinnings of the original story -- that the children are normal, even banal.  It is the adults who have the problems.

In the original story, what shocks the heroine most of all when Mrs Grose tells her about the past relationship between Peter Quint and Miss Jessel is that they are jumping the class barrier.  Miss Jessel is a gentlewoman, like her successor, but Quint is a 'base menial'.  Lenkiewicz ignores this and puts into Mrs Grose's mouth a different story, that Miss Jessel became pregnant but Quint refused to marry her.  Instead, she injects an element of class tension in Miles's attitude to his governess, whom he accuses of being from a poor family 'almost in the workhouse'.  I think this shows a misunderstanding of the period, as does Miles' familiar use of 'old girl' to address his governess. 

I am not usually a fan of plays in which characters stand and narrate their stories to the audience; however I think this device might have added an extra dimension to the play.  I also wonder whether the sponge-like Mrs Grose could have been developed more.  But the play's central problem is that the audience, like the governess, sees the ghosts as three-dimensional and 'real'.  Mrs Grose and the two children, who don't see the ghosts, are made to appear delusional.  This is the opposite of what James wanted to suggest.