Fancy a real New Year's Eve spine-tingler? Look no further than The Haunting of Alice Bowles
Subsequent to the publication of his collected ghost stories in 1931, MR James wrote The Experiment, subtitled “A New Year’s Eve Ghost Story” and published on December 31 in The Morning Post. It begins with the news of the death of a wealthy Norfolk squire, apparently felled by a sickness sweeping the land in the dying days of the unspecified year.
“Terrible, terrible,” says the receiver of the bad tidings, the local rector, who’s then prevailed upon by the new widow and her son (the deceased’s stepson) to bury the body as soon as possible (earth grave, no coffin). Where Francis Bowles (who had seemed on the mend) has left all his riches, though, is a mystery.
What happens next? The original (fairly brief) text moves in one direction; Philip Franks’ new dramatised version cleaves faithfully enough to the bare-bones of the ghoulish happenings but fleshes things out in ways period suspenseful and Covid-era insightful.
Giving away plot points doesn’t spoil all, though. For it’s the way your imagination gets hooked in through overall atmosphere and incidental detail that lends the piece life on the page and on the virtual platform created by Original theatre company, who follow their prior success (in particular) with Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong by once again splicing together the impressive contributions of actors performing mainly in their own homes.
James – who delighted in narrative gaps (allowing the reader to join the dots) – argued that the potency of his writing stemmed from inducing the fearful internal reflection: “If I’m not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!” And that is the peculiar primal sensation that almost seems to take hold watching (preferably alone, preferably at night) Franks’s approach (co-directed with Alastair Whatley) to what initially looks like an open-and-shut case of an impatient grasping second wife.
The inspired creative departure is to alter and double the time-frame. The action cuts between Spanish Flu-struck 1918 and the present-day of pandemic panic. In fate-temptingly insouciant fashion, a YouTuber couple called Matt and Caitlin (Max Bowden, Alexandra Guelff) are on the prowl for monetised clicks by making nocturnal, treasure-hunt forays to a local site where the unknown victims of that influenza epidemic are buried.
Watching their uploads on a laptop – his back to the viewer – is a sinister, desk-bound aged figure who takes a creepy interest in young, inquisitive and acquisitive Matt in much the same way that a Mr Fowler in Gloucester, bosom-buddies with the late Bowles, took a decadent shine to Alice’s perturbed young son Joseph. Are they one and the same man? The chronology doesn’t quite fit, and yet the time-straddling story bypasses the firewall of logic, creating a pervasive malignancy – thus, a spirit-conjuration in one period not only mirrors another but seems connected to it.
There are big ideas here: about the risks of our sharing so much online, and the way dark forces (populist, patriarchal, supremacist and sexually abusive) can move virally fast, right into our bedrooms. Cutting between real-world (contemporary) interiors and picture-book backdrops evoking bygone old-world Blighty, the editing and camera-work (film director: Tristan Shepherd) achieves an invasive intimacy. We’re tempted (with subtle lighting worthy of Velázquez) to notice age-differences in skin texture and read each character’s slightest expression – the battened-down tension in the face of Tamzin Outhwaite’s Alice, say, or the perspiring alarm of Jack Archer’s Joseph. At 45 minutes, it could perhaps last longer – and offer a less abrupt ending – but it lingers horribly in the mind afterwards, as all good spine-tinglers should.
Available until 28 February: originaltheatreonline.com