mc start just shows black screen through putty

[Chris]

Hi,

I'm a long-time enthusiastic user of mc, using it on a number of virtual 
and bare metal machines. For one particular new machine with a fresh 
install of Ubuntu 18.04, I have now come across a strange issue:

When I open a console on the machine, I can start mc. However, via 
putty, starting mc just brings up a black screen with the standard upper 
right corner (one character) in the upper right and the "Hint: Want your 
plain shell? Press C-o, and get back to MC with C-o again." text at the 
bottom. That putty window is totally unresponsive.

I am using the same putty configuration that I am using with dozens of 
other machines (incl. Ubuntu 18.04) and that works just fine there. I 
have tried deleting ~/.config/mc, and I have also tried upgrading from 
the stock MC version provided by Ubuntu 18.04 to the newest release 
version. No change.

I also tried using the Bitvise SSH client and the ssh client built into 
Windows 10 instead of putty, but am running into the same problem. mc 
does show, however, in termius on iOS.

If anybody has a hint on what I might try to get MC running from remote 
on that particular machine, that would be great!

Thanks, Chris