New Play in Manhattan

The Innocents (adapted by William Archibald from Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.; produced by Peter Cookson) dramatizes with considerable tact and fidelity what is probably the most famous of modern ghost stories. As does The Turn of the Screw, it often whispers rather than speaks, suggests far more than it explains, and calls up something not only eerie but evil.

The scene of The Innocents is a great rambling English country house in the 1880s. There, alone with the housekeeper and two children, is a sensitive young governess. But she finds that she is not alone with them. Hovering malignly about are the ghosts of a sinister valet and the governess he had driven to suicide. While these two lived, she learns from the housekeeper, they had some kind of hold over the seemingly innocent but strangely knowing children; and now, she feels, they have it again as ghosts. She sends the eight-year-old girl away with the housekeeper, but chooses to stay behind with the twelve-year-old boy, determined to ferret out the truth and free him from the valet's domination.

Over the years The Turn of the Screw has become more than a notable ghost story to chill the blood: it has become a kind of highbrow mystery story to challenge the mind. Pre-Freudian but often strikingly akin to Freud, it hints at something sexual in the governess' feeling for the boy, at something homosexual between the boy and the valet. It has been explained, a little too ingeniously, as a pure hallucination of the governess'. But first, last and always, it is a ghost story; and ghosts owe their audiences only an experience, not an explanation.

Adapter Archibald has not tried to force the lock of Henry James's intentions; he nowhere cheats or even cheapens. Moreover, his play captures a certain Jamesian elegance as well as eeriness. With the help of Jo Mielziner's fine period set, Alex North's effective music and Peter Glenville's perceptive staging, The Innocents inhabits a different world from the usual, or even the unusual, thriller.

Yet though the play breathes the spirit of the story, it does not exert the same spell. Often it cannot: some of the finest moments are lost to the stage. On its own terms, The Innocents is a little too thin: often fascinating, always atmospheric, it has few real outward thrills, little real inner tension. Its best scenes involve the children, brilliantly played by Child Actors David Cole and Iris Mann. As the governess, Beatrice Straight offers competence faintly tinged with monotony.

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