We sat down for an exclusive interview with Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and Nicky Allpress, writer and director of The Turn of the Screw. England. A remote country house. A young governess, hired to care for two children, begins what appears to be an idyllic new life – but something about the children hints at a darker presence.
The Turn of the Screw will be performed from 11th September until 10th October at the Arcola Theatre in London- tickets here.
What first drew you both to Henry James’ gothic horror The Turn of the Screw, and what felt most urgent or resonant about revisiting it now?
NA: This story chilled me when I first read it as a teenager, and now, as the parent of three young people who love a scary story, I couldn’t resist returning to it. I knew that by collaborating with Morgan we’d discover a fresh way into the story from the young governess’s point of view. I wanted it to feel uncannily resonant today — and being the story of a traumatised young woman whose claims are ignored, made that surprisingly easy.
MLM: It’s an absolute classic example of a gothic horror that has inspired so many adaptations and horrors through the years and there is something so intrinsically strange and spooky that gets under your skin. I was particularly taken with the central characters of the Governess and the various theories about her account of what happened and how so many do not believe her both within the story and in terms of audiences through time. I wanted to explore this as it feels depressingly contemporary to have a woman not being believed.
How does working with Henry James’ original text through a contemporary female-led creative partnership shift the story’s perspective or emotional focus? How closely do you follow his story?
NA: The play’s central question seems to be: what happens when a woman tells the truth but no one believes her? Many interpretations of The Turn of the Screw begin with the assumption that the governess is losing her mind, but we felt there was so much more to uncover in Henry James’s writing. He was a master of subtext, writing within the constraints of an intensely buttoned-up Victorian society where so much had to remain implied rather than spoken aloud. Despite being American, his voice is remarkably restrained, revealing as much through silence as through language.
So it felt important that a female creative partnership should explore what lies beneath those silences without straying too far from James’s original text. At its heart, this is the story of a young woman — idealistic, intelligent and embarking on what should have been her first exciting appointment — who finds herself caught in an increasingly terrifying experience. We want to create space for her voice to be heard, rather than simply allowing her to become another woman whose testimony is dismissed as madness.
MLM: The story as Henry James tells it is still very much the backbone of our production but we are really examining the way in which the story is told from the Governesses perspective and how this can be used to skew what we do and don’t believe. The question of whether the haunting she experiences is real hangs over the whole story and we love the ambiguity of James’ telling so we wanted to push on that even more.
What aspects of power, gender, or authorship became more visible to you once you began reinterpreting the material on stage?
NA: It became less about solving James’s ambiguities than entering into a conversation with them, and I grew fascinated by the way ambiguity itself can become a form of power, both within the story and in the way audiences experience it. I feel we have unlocked a big central question by introducing a perspective that’s not present in the novella. It made me realise how often women are expected to justify their own experiences, while those in positions of authority rarely are.
MLM: Any time I adapt a classic novel I will always be bringing my own lens to it and my interests and passions lie with finding the perspectives of the women in the story. This always pulls out wonderful insights into how we interpret classic works and always challenges traditional narratives that perhaps we’ve all grown up with or studied. It is always exciting to ask of a text ‘but what if that interpretation has it wrong, what if we listened to her instead?’ I am always interested to challenge gender assumptions that have been hard wired into our knowledge of history and classic texts because there are more than one way to read and understand events.
In what ways do you see this production sitting alongside the broader wave of female-led reimaginings of canonical texts in theatre right now?
NA: It’s an exciting moment to be revisiting the classics because so many artists are asking fresh questions of familiar stories rather than discarding them. I see our production as part of that conversation. The Turn of the Screw is a story about a woman, written by a man, reimagined by women. That inevitably brings a different perspective, but it isn’t about rewriting Henry James or imposing a contemporary agenda onto his work. It’s about looking at the story through a slightly different lens while remaining faithful to its spirit (forgive the pun). At its heart, our production is striving to hold onto what The Turn of the Screw has always offered: a brilliantly crafted, chilling ghost story that has haunted readers for well over a century.
MLM: I hope it both honours the original whilst also giving us a version that focuses on the governess and her experience being so indicative of so many women through the ages. It is as much a story about what is happening now to women as it is back then.
What do you hope contemporary audiences reconsider about “classic” stories when they are reframed through new authorship or gaze?
NA: I’d love contemporary audiences to watch it and be reminded that ‘oh yeah – some of this old stuff is really great’, because it is! I hope audiences, especially young people, are so surprised by the thrill factor that they are left hungry to seek out more juicy classics.
MLM: I suppose what I hope contemporary audience get from adaptations are a renewed interest in brilliant classics that they can go and re-read with a fresh perspective. The best stories transcend time and there are always parallels and similarities to be found in the human experiences and this is what I’m always digging into. At the end of the day this is a very well told scary story that leaves us with a lot of questions that are just as much a part of the fabric of why it is scary. The questions we will leave the audience with are just as disquieting.
What do you hope audiences will leave this production with?
NA: I hope folks will still be vehemently disagreeing with each other about ‘the truth’ of the matter by the time they get home, just as Henry James intended.
MLM: I really hope the conversations in the bar after are lively because we’re not providing all the answers and instead we are going on a journey with Henry James’ brilliant story that will provoke so many interpretations. I really hope they take from our production a sense of the amazing resilience of women and a creepy sense of how insidious and all pervading the threat of the unknown can be…