Ghosts bringing a modern message

The hidden horrors of Henry James's 'The Turn of the Screw'only became clear to Liam Halligan when he reread the story after many years. His adaptation for Storytellers is an attempt to realise the complexity other stage versions have missed CATHERINE FOLEYreports

BE WARNED! The Turn of the Screw, an upcoming Storytellers Theatre Company production, is not for the faint-hearted. The inner workings of the mind, psychological trauma and dark questions about the attractiveness of childhood innocence and its power to corrupt continue to fascinate playwright and director Liam Halligan.

In the past, Halligan created Cracked, a piece devised in collaboration with St Loman's psychiatric hospital in Mullingar, which explored the life of female patients in the mental institutions of the 1950s and 1960s. Now he has turned his attention to the Henry James classic and adapted it for the stage.

"The writer is presenting us with some very uneasy questions about power and sexual attraction, about notions of childhood innocence and religious zeal," Halligan says, adding that he was initially drawn to the story of the young governess and her two young charges because "it seemed to be a mysterious and delicate ghost story". It was years later when he reread it that the story's hidden horrors became apparent to him.

He believes other adaptations of the book have minimised the complexity of the story. It's an important fact that the governess is dying and aged 50 when she records the story of what happened, he maintains.

"So the text is her opinion of what happened 30 years previously when she was young. We have to imagine what the truth of the situation was," says Halligan. "She always has a doubt in her mind if she did the right thing, which I think is wonderfully human and real, but that aspect of the story hasn't been integrated into any of the adaptations that I've seen. It's a mature woman looking back at a delicate moment."

The story is largely concerned with the governess's growing obsession that ghosts are haunting the house and intent on possessing the children. "To me, ghosts are memories of people that live with you. Both my parents are dead, but their memories are with me now. So in some ways, I do believe in ghosts. I believe in memories," Halligan says.

One of the shocks in this ghostly tale, he says, is when "you realise that the young girl is bottom-line obsessed with the beauty of these children, and that she is on a mission, and that she does transfer her sexual energy on to them and that they possibly toy with her in some way".

Even today, there are aspects of the story that are a mystery, "but now, in 2008, we can know the parameters of that mystery", according to Halligan. "We know so much more. Unfortunately, we know the horrors that we can commit against children and against each other in terms of sexual abuse and mental abuse. We know every day, graphically, what's going on."

He cites the Madeleine McCann case, where "everybody assumes all sorts of horrors even though it may not be true" and the case in Omagh where a family was burned to death. "And we immediately assume that somebody in the family was involved. That might not at all be the case, but I know that that's where we imagine the worst. What Henry James did was to provide us in the story with a blank that we have to fill in ourselves. I think he's an absolute genius that he has managed to write the story just giving you enough without giving you too much, so that it forces the audience or the reader to imagine what happened."

ON CLOSER INSPECTION, it's clear that there is a thematic consistency to Halligan's interest in ghosts and the occult. Three years ago, his first job as artistic director of Storytellers was to create and stage a play about Lafcadio Hearn, the Dublin-reared man who became a literary giant in Japan.

"I attempted to integrate these wonderful ghost stories with the life of the writer, Lafcadio Hearn," he says.

The play was partly concerned with the fact that Hearn was a lonely child with an unusual love of ghost stories and the occult.

"I think theatre is the perfect medium where you can express unreal things like insanity, immense passion, the world of memories, of ghosts. You can actually create these in theatre, which you can't create in any other medium, because you are looking at mood," he says.

But, he points out, adapting and directing The Turn of the Screw, which is part psychological thriller and part gothic horror, was easier than writing a play about Hearn. "Henry James hands it to you on a plate. It's a very definite story. You've got the characters, you've got the situation. He gives you all the duologues, but he doesn't tell you . . .

"It is completely open to interpretation. There are hints that Henry James drops along the way, like the fact that the governess's father is a parson, like the fact that she is the youngest child in her family, like the fact that her family life hasn't been happy - we don't know why."

He insists that he has remained faithful to the book and that he has not added or subtracted additional clues.

"No, I've been very faithful in that regard because I think that is the special quality of the book and what draws me to it, and what I think is theatrical about it," he says. "If we can manage to sustain that delicacy and tease the audience in a way, so that they are allowed to make up their minds and judge the situation, that is the essence of theatre, where the audience is completely involved and you send them away with this mystery and they have to solve it. We provide clues. It means that I have to be very clear how I see the story."

HIS OWN OBSESSION with the darker aspects of the mind does not stem from a belief in ghosts, but he points out that "at extreme times we are capable of seeing strange things, or strange things can happen that we can't explain, and it's too easy for me in 2008 to dismiss questions about ghosts, because who am I to say ghosts don't exist, that there is no spirit world out there?"

He is not worried about audiences being horrified or appalled by the play's dark subject, pointing quickly to the beautiful set that has been designed by Marcus Costello, and also to the important role music plays in the production.

"I felt it was crucial to have actors who could play music because it gives the children an opportunity . . . to express their trauma. Both will have a cello. The instrument is a tool," he says. "Otherwise, if you don't have the instrument, you really can't express the trauma in any other way. I know there are certain things that work, I know an actor playing a musical instrument can express a huge amount about their soul that you can't express in any other way."

As for the set, it is "in the shape of an eye", consisting of water along the outer front rim of the stage and a circular walkway ringing the back. It's a fitting image for Halligan, whose quest to understand James's central concern is like the proverbial microscope, trained doggedly on the questions that are raised in The Turn of the Screw.

"Is there a right and is there a wrong? Who is sane and who is mad? What is good and what is evil? Can we be absolute about anything? James doesn't give us any answers. We have to weigh up the evidence, we have to interpret the actions and we have to judge who is guilty," says Halligan, his own eyes full of questioning soulfulness.

The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, in an adaptation by Liam Halligan for Storytellers Theatre Company, opens at the Civic Theatre, Tallaght, on April 1 for one week, then goes on national tour until May 10. For tour details, go to  www.storytellerstheatrecompany.com