Shirley: A Ghost Story
“She wasn’t some apron-wearing hourglass who waited for her husband to get home; she was a witch.”
A line worthy of the great Shirley Jackson, the celebrated and influential writer of mystery and horror still recognised for her devastating story The Lottery and the novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, both masterpieces with the last only published three years before her death in 1965 at the age of forty-eight, though she also wrote humorously of her family in Life Among the Savages.
Her short stories, novels and her “domestic memoirs” weaving truths and fiction together in a manner impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins, so does Shirley: A Ghost Story, written and directed by Josh King and performed by Jasmin Gleeson, telling the story of a woman named Shirley whose life parallels Jackson in many ways though diverges in others, married to a snobbish academic called Stanley who encourages and stifles her in equal parts as she tries to craft her first novel.
Looking every inch the part in her pale yellow cardigan matching the colours of her patterned skirt and her riot of curls barely contained by a hairclip, like Jacksons greatest works the concerns are immediate and modern, expressed with the clarity of a writer who is painfully self-aware of their anxieties and drivers, citing her childhood, her husband and a specific memory of a cruel, haunting game her father used to play, her imagination triggered with an image which recurs, the trapdoor to the attic and the dark cobwebbed space beyond.
A woman who knew that true haunting was the manifesting of inner ghosts whose work expressed the commonplace ghastly, the sudden bloody shocks in everyday life where the deepest unhappiness is expressed in silence, King’s script captures the vivid precision of her writing, Jackson a woman ahead of her time who was dissuaded by those who could not understand or compete with her, the suggestion that she tone down her unique voice to become a writer of comfortable “pipe and slippers novels” one she fortunately escaped.
Shirley: A Ghost Story continues at theSpace at Surgeon’s Hall until Saturday 23rd August
