The Turn of the Screw review – Henry James’s classic ghost story with added jump scares

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Here is Henry James’s canonical ghost story with modern-day jump scares. And, more audaciously, a new framing device by writer-adapter, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, which explains itself in a final, added, twist.

The jump scares do their work, Hattie North’s jagged sound design enacting its shocks, and the production is slick and stylised – but not all the elements pay off.

It is the same story, of a governess (Amy Tara) who, wooed by a roguish gentleman (Jim Fish) becomes a tutor to two young charges in a tenure that culminates in tragedy.

Lloyd Malcolm’s framing device features an unnamed (imaginary or real?) man interrogating the governess’ version of events: that her two seemingly angelic charges are possessed. His accusatory questioning suggests the age-old contention that the woman is an unreliable narrator and unhinged fantasist but his interruptions are too numerous, hampering the buildup of dread and tension. The chopped up nature of the story (you hear what is coming, travelling back and forth in time sequences) has the same effect.

The production sets itself up with great promise. The two children, Flora (Kathleen McAuley Irvine) and Miles (Toby Beynon), appear suddenly out of darkness on Matthew Cassar’s elegantly gothic set of screens. So does housekeeper, Mrs Grose (Katy Slater, not the friend and confidante she is in the novella), as well as the apparitions of dead manservant Quint and former governess Miss Jessel (played by the children).

Directed by Nicky Allpress, the action is stylised, with minimal props used. Flora’s eerie doll raises the hairs and the screens are used inventively. But you don’t always know what is going on, which becomes most apparent in the lake scene in which the governess finds herself under water. There are whistles, screams and characters who suddenly appear and disappear. It’s creepy, but too much too soon, leading to inevitable repetition.

Tara, Toby Beynon and Kathleen McAuley in Turn Of The Screw.

The children look like grownups, in costume, and this draws them closer to the adults (Quint for Miles, and Miss Jessel for Flora) who the governess believes have taken possession of them. It gives them an added edge of sinister knowingness that comes close to menace at times: Flora’s glassy-eyed smiles and Miles’s joshing as he queasily puts his head under the governess’s skirts. But his innocence is particularly eclipsed by Beynon’s physicality: he looks like Quint from the off, so it is harder to believe in him as the 10-year-old.

There are some startling visual moments: the screens do a fine job of bringing on characters as if out of nowhere. The final twist, looping back to the beginning, half explains the puzzle of the governess’s interrogation (Who is the man? What does he want to prove? Which timeframe is she in?) and the idea of women having to eternally defend their version of events. But the production is hampered by its own cleverness, the elliptic storytelling a distraction from the clarity and intrigue of this story’s psychological questions around fear, sexual desire and moral corruption.