Monday, November 2, 2009

The Turn of the Screw, Austin Playhouse, October 23 - November 8







Henry James' novella
The Turn of the Screw takes you into a dark place. A brief chapter sets the scene. On Christmas Eve in an old house in the countryside a group of bourgeois friends have just listened to a ghost story. Their host, Douglas, offers them another, but they have to wait for a manuscript to be dispatched from his residence in London.

That text -- "in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand" -- came from his sister's governess, twenty years dead. Her words as imagined by James constitute the entirety of the rest of the novella.

The unnamed woman is the well-read but lonely daughter of an impoverished country clergyman. At an interview in Harley Street, central London, she agrees to care for two orphaned children at a distant estate called Bly. Her new employer, the gallant but inveterate bachelor who is their guardian and uncle, admonishes her that she is never, ever to contact him. Of course, she is immediately infatuated in that gallant gentleman.

So there we are, inside her head.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . .


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