“The Turn of the Screw” at Arcola Theatre

Maryam Philpott in East London
★★★★☆
19 September 2026

Do the dead return to corrupt the living? Do you really trust your own mind? Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s new adaptation of Henry James’s horror story The Turn of the Screw is staged as an interrogation of a governess’s claims to both sanity and as a witness to paranormal activity. Unpicking her narrative is the central tenet of Lloyd Malcolm’s approach that cuts between present and past while director Nicky Allpress creates a dramatic sense of psychological claustrophobia in the Arcola Theatre’s studio space.

Amy Tara, Katy Slater and Toby Beynon.
Photo credit: Alex Brenner.

Having met her employer only once, a Governess takes up a job at his isolated country manor caring for his niece Flora and nephew Miles who he never visits. Within days of her arrival, the Governess senses something amiss in the unsettled atmosphere of the house, and as she learns more about the family and her predecessors, she has a number of visions. But is her imagination playing tricks or is something more sinister and earthly taking place?

This two-hour play is simply staged with almost no set or excessive physicality to distract the audience from the atmosphere and imaginative possibilities that James and Lloyd Malcolm lay out. This has a dual purpose by first casting enough doubt on the Governess’s story as it cuts back and forth in time with the telling and retelling of unlikely incidents, asking the viewer to conjure locations, surroundings, and possibilities in the ways that the Governess may have done – to see the ghosts she claims have shaped her time with the children.

But the simplicity of the staging also prioritizes James’s original text, leaning into its origins as a novella and allowing his original descriptions to rest in the characters’ mouths which – like other classic authors of supernatural fictions – let the worlds and the mind do the work that more overt theatre tricks can never match.

Amy Tara and Katy Slater.
Photo credit: Alex Brenner.

And through that, The Turn of the Screw is effective in delivering a sense of the paranormal activities and enough doubt that the Governess may be mistaken to drive the show, never fully trusting a single perspective on events. The design team instead subtly enhances the things audience members should react to with Oliver McNally’s flashes of crackling light and shadow, and especially Hattie North’s immersive aural soundscape which prompts many of these ideas and fears into life, transporting the viewer and the characters to all kinds of isolated, dark, and lonely spaces.

Amy Tara leads a small but strong cast as the Governess who is ever certain of her own mind while becoming increasingly compromised by her own choices drawn out by Jim Fish as her unexplained but insistently rational interrogator. There’s nicely sinister work from Kathleen McAuley Irvine as Flora who becomes more unnerving later in the show, as well as Toby Beynon as Miles, the suspicious older child returned from boarding school without explanation.

It’s all deftly gothic in concept, with Lloyd Malcolm introducing hints of the sexual undercurrents and hysteria that attach themselves to interpretations of the Governess’s narrative without distracting from the exploration of memory, perception, and imagination that still draw readers to this classic ghost story.