It is a bit of a shock. On entering the Old Vic's sedately beautiful auditorium you are confronted by what appears to be a giant erect penis. Only on closer examination do you realise that the image is of a ripe lily, its yellow stamen rising out of furled waxy petals. It serves as a warning of what is to follow: an evening that transforms Henry James's delicate flower of a novella into a blunt instrument that hits the audience over the head with its blatant sexual and religious imagery and its penny dreadful horror.
Nick Dear's version was originally written for TV and it shows. James's story of a young, inexperienced governess only recently released into the world from the confines of her father's country parsonage, and charged with looking after two young children at a remote country estate in Essex, is taut and suggestive.
Simon Reade's production is no such thing. James's story has the power to intrigue and unsettle as you are never sure whether the ghosts are real or a product of the governess's fevered imagination, whether the children are genuine innocents or have indeed been appallingly corrupted, as the governess believes, by her predecessor Miss Jessel and the vicious Peter Quint.
As Virginia Woolf observed, James's hauntings are not external but internal manifestations, and "have their origin within us". This production allows for no such origin or ambiguities. The ghosts are the white-faced horrors of Victorian melodrama, the unconscious is made all too conscious and instead of multiple meanings, the story is given just one reading: the tale of a young woman who becomes sexually fixated on her unattainable employer and goes completely bonkers.
Like the lilies it is ripe, too ripe. It might matter less if the production was stronger. But it offers shocks without real fear, it moves at a snail's pace and what dramatic tension it achieves is destroyed by an unnecessary interval. It is also hampered by a cumbersome design with a cylindrical revolve that takes forever to turn and turn again. The production is badly miscast, too. If you want to experience a real shiver of terror, stay at home and read the novel.
· Until April 23. Box office: 0117 987 7877.
