These days, the Turn of the Screw has become an operatic standby. So you might think it would be hard to inject freshly original layers of menace into Benjamin Britten’s claustrophobically taut adaptation of Henry James. Isabella Bywater has nevertheless found a way in her production for English National Opera. Not every idea lands, but in this intelligent and demanding production, the big one does, and its implications ripple across the whole evening.
Does anyone other than the governess see the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel who appear to drive the tragedy at Bly? In his novella, James never provides an answer to this key question. To put the story on the stage, however, Britten and his librettist Myfanwy Piper required Quint and Miss Jessel to be visible, to interact, and to sing. This can turn the governess’s role into a one-woman rescue mission, as she tries to break the ghosts’ hold on her charges, Miles and Flora.
Bywater, though, restores all the original uncertainties, by setting the story in an institution where the former governess is now a patient. The events thus evolve from the governess’s mind and from the journal – the “curious tale” from which the narrator reads at the very start. By doing this, Bywayer ups the ambiguity and creepiness several notches, making the governess an even more elusive figure than usual.
The effect is to make the story more fragmented and multilayered. But its half-known possibilities do not end there. A modern audience knows that child abuse is real. It is not, as it may have felt when the opera was first performed in 1954, some remote imaginative transgressive possibility, hinted at in some of the most alluringly seductive music Britten composed. It makes this production of The Turn of the Screw more challenging to watch than ever, and the better for it.
Duncan Ward conducts Britten’s fabulously written score with urgency and conviction, though the playing can sometimes be too loud for detail to make its ideal mark. The menace of the house at Bly is brilliantly evoked by Jon Driscoll’s black and white video projections on to the institutional walls of the set. Shadows and half-glimpses are rivetingly captured, not least at the very end, in Paul Anderson’s dramatically effective lighting. The addition of three non-speaking actors to the cast – which in other circumstances could be irritating and distracting – only adds to the slippery vision.
The singers all convey their characters’ ambiguities. As the children Miles and Flora, Jerry Louth and Victoria Nekhaenko mix innocence and knowingness. Robert Murray makes Quint both alluring and distant. Eleanor Dennis does minor wonders with Miss Jessel’s sinister sadness. Gweneth Ann Rand never overdoes the hapless decency of Mrs Grose. Best and most important of all, Ailish Tynan sings the governess with an, at times, ravishing purity. It is the vocal performance that Bywater’s approach requires, alluring and fascinating, but not necessarily what it seems.
