Kathleen McAuley Irvine, Toby Beynon and Amy Tara. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner
★ ★ ★ ★
Review by Simon Jenner, September 18 2026
“You make the truth so unbelievable that it becomes absurd.” A young woman questions being questioned – it seems like prosecuted by a man at an inquest. A child has died. The burden lies on her. Henry James’ classic 1898 novella – from which Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black was partially inspired – has proved ambiguous from the start. Are their malign ghosts, as James heard? Or are they manifestations of a savagely-used and abandoned young woman already prone to delusions as he also suggests? That’s how Britten leaned in his 1954 opera. Or is there a third, scarier option altogether? An option women know only too well. Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s adaptation of The Turn of the Screw directed by Nicky Allpress for Blackeyed Theatre plays at Arcola’s Studio1 till October 10.
Jim Fish and Amy Tara. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner
This version, lasting two hours 20, opens vehemently as Amy Tara’s Governess states she knows the difference between illusions and truth. Jim Fish as the truculent Yorkshire coroner both undermines every iteration she offers and faintly mocks her. However there’s one piece of evidence where his needling brings forth a truth he mightn’t wish for. In James’ original the Governess projects onto the romantic figure of the guardian (or Master), here also the uncle. Tara shivers both outrage and fear, and at other times excitement. Her baseline though is a believable warmth tinged with the anxiety of the untried.
Fish as the urbane, controlling city man clearly prefers young untried Governesses and interviews her himself. Lloyd Malcolm shows him grooming as any Harvey Weinstein would, offering her the chance of a visit to pick up some papers. Shafts of this interview percolates through this production, where the Master, though absent has been known to visit Bly: the house he claims not want to hear more of. And seems preternaturally close to his footman Quint, who dressed in the Master’s clothes and has mysteriously died’ who “had enemies”. And the previous untried “almost as young and pretty” Miss Jessell who has also mysteriously died.
Lloyd Malcolm skews things to a telescope that es sense. Katy Slater’s distant, occasionally hostile Mrs Grose is not only taciturn, she discourages questions and doesn’t give answers if she can help it. Kathleen McAuley Irvine’s Flora is brimful of youthful brio, scampering playfulness; and a seeming innocence. Then comes a look between her and brother Miles. The voice of Miss Jessel, clearly a young Scotswoman comes at a surprising point.
Toby Beynon has to navigate a more grown adolescent in Miles and Quint on occasion. The edgy chemistry of the forbidden percolate between him and McAuley Irvine. Not just because the voices of the dead are trying to live through siblings, but because their own love was in those classsist times, forbidden. Jessel is a “lad” and Quint a manservant. But hasn’t he been granted a kind of permission by an indulgent Master? And what happened when the Master arrived?
Benyon manages a smiling ambiguity that might or might not contain menace. When the full Quint he’s demonically radiant with self-possession and telling the Governess home truths as he moves in.
Photo credit: Feruza Afewerki.
Amy Tara, Katy Slater and Toby Beynon. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner
There’s a striking additional moment when someone plunges into water, blue-lit in a striking moment, as others seem to watch passively. Several such instances and rewritings of characters turn the screw in a different thread. Following the plot closely in other respects we’re treated to a rapprochement between Tara’s and Slater’s characters (Slater excellent at slight thawing, Tara as ever taut to snapping point but resolute); and throughout a repurposing of themes.
Matthew Cassar’s strikingly diaphanous set makes use of the intimate horseshow effect and crafts an impenetrable shimmer of the upstage wall. It’s a frontage in front of the frontage of Bly, where between a tenebrous corridor shadowed with flitting figures, where Oliver McNally’s lighting shafts half-caught or momentarily shock-bright images where Wayne Fox’s illusions. Cassar’s period costumes are sumptuous, down to the governess’s fashionably mauve dress: the only colour in this black and white world. Hattie North goes for huge shlock chords and a sinister Woman in Black feel to the damaged Jack-in-the-Box. Mandy Gordon makes a sinister ballet of intimacy and movement.
The climax though, with those famously ambiguous words “Peter Quint – you devil!” struck out, is soft-balled. Quite why Miles dies isn’t explored. If strangled in too firm a grip, it’s not clear, and the apparitional can’t work here either. Janita Mikkola as sole ensemble member certainly helps elsewhere; but this is where Benyon and Tara must interact. It doesn’t seem wholly felt through.
What is though is the reframing of the relationship between Quint, Jessel, the Governess and the Master. This is as it were masterly. It runs with what James gives, in ways he might only have nightmared. But the writer of The Portrait of a Lady would hardly have been surprised. This is on it own terms an entirely original, exciting and thoroughly convincing take on the original. Caveat aside – and it might be reworked – this is a compelling must-see. A Turn of the Screw for #MeToo.
Assistant Director Emma Wilkinson, Costume Supervisor Be Vina, Costume Maker Jasmina Temple Tims, Vocal Coach Megan burns, Programme Eli Hunt, Props Maker Gillian Tormey, Scenic Construction Fraktl, Production Manager Joe Pentice, Technical CSM Gregor Reid, ASM Flynn Burgess, Producer Adrian McGougall.
Photo credit: Feruza Afewerki.
Katy Slater, Amy Tara and Toby Beynon. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner
As does the ever-quickening tempo of the narrative, often cab-driven as it were, as connections between characters begin to form: like white-hot filaments or those illuminated chains, that bind in another way too. Ambrose, Pipe and Smith are all equally superb. Smith enjoys the greatest diversity, as beyond Bex and Gigi she’s Twix too. Additionally Smith introduces a Deus ex machina character towards the end, who could have been semaphored – if only glancingly – a couple of times before.
Movement Director Rose Ryan ensures this is a boppy and wild a performance on the floor as you can fit in the Little. There’s a disco beat where David Lewington’s sound morphs from ambient traffic through to techno-clubbing with bass as Jack and Tia, or Tamara and Gigi, get some partying and sightseeing in.
Is the ending a little too uplifting? Deaths arrive not quite where you’re led to expect them, though there’s dark too. And a satisfying pay-off nearly everywhere. It’s a thrilling ride as scenes flick and segue on a head-twist. Wilkinson delights in denser textures than Union, with more actors, and the velocity of his stagecraft is exhilarating. This paean to the mass of gig workers who slave in precarity to make London buzz 24/7 is timely, personal, and a battle-cry with nuance: not easy to bring off. The late Mark Fisher wrote in 2009 at the dawn of the gig economy his manifesto: Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? He’d be pleased to see the emphatic answer here.
Casting Director Fran Cataneo Production manager Emma Langan, Stage Manager Venus raven, PR Gingerbread Agency, Marketing Cup of Ambition, Producer Clarisse Makundul.