On the eve of Halloween, a small and anxious audience waited quietly on the landing of an old mahogany staircase. The lights of Laurier House dimmed — and the play began.
“We were really interested in the idea of doing a ghost story in a haunted house on Halloween,” said actor Kris Joseph, as he and fellow cast member Kate Smith prepared for their performance in an upstairs bathroom that doubled as a dressing room.
“I don’t think we could have found a more perfect spot for it,” Smith agreed. “Especially because of its hauntedness.”
Laurier House, the former home of Canadian prime ministers Sir Wilfrid Laurier and William Lyon Mackenzie King, is the perfect stage for director Patrick Gauthier’s rendition of The Turn of the Screw, a play adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher from Henry James’ 1898 novel.
Long believed to be haunted, Laurier House has seen the deaths of Laurier and his wife, seances performed by Mackenzie King and, more recently, the ghostly flickering of a lamp on the third floor. Many profess to feeling the presence of one or both of these late leaders in the house.
But Smith and Joseph are hardly spooked.
“It has been a real privilege to be here,” Joseph said. “The room at the end of this hallway here was King’s office. . . I mean, you can almost see him smoking a cigar with Winston Churchill,” he said. “We owe it to our former prime ministers that we can be in here.”
“I don’t think there are any bad ghosts,” Smith said. “And it’s kind of nice that, as a Canadian citizen, this house belongs to you.”
“I feel very welcome here,” Joseph agreed as Smith combed her hair into a stiff 19th century updo. “I don’t feel threatened.”
A certain level of confidence and ease is necessary for the two actors performing in such an “intimate space,” as their performance space is always less than 10 feet from the audience.
Smith plays the role of the governess, never leaving the confines of the stairs, landing and bedroom archway that make up the stage.
“I don’t get to run away and hide at any point,” she said.
Joseph fulfills the roles of the other five characters, ranging from a 10-year-old disturbed English boy to an elderly female servant. He establishes each one with a distinct stance, voice and persona.
“It’s great to be able to work with [just] one actor on a play,” Joseph said. “What’s interesting in theatre is what happens between people.”
The creation of the play was a very collaborative process. “Everyone had their production responsibilities,” Smith said.
“The nice thing about a co-op is that it’s kind of like a hippie collective,” Joseph said. “We get to write our own rule book.”
“In rehearsal, we all just bounce ideas off each other and we just agree on what we want to do. It has been terrific,” Joseph said.
Though the piece is set in a haunted mansion itself, Joseph said Gauthier has chosen to avoid complete naturalism.
“Theatre is its own beast. If I wanted realism, I could see it on television,” Joseph explained.
There are slightly stylized elements in the dialogue — facing the audience while speaking to each other, for instance, and providing their own music in scenes of heightened tension.
But the stylization is “just heightened enough so you still know this is theatre,” Joseph said.
“This is the kind of thing that brings humans together,” Smith said. “Everyone loves to be scared.”
The Turn of the Screw is showing at Laurier House until Nov. 7.