Singing and stage direction impress in Britten’s The Turn of the Screw in Copenhagen

The Turn of the Screw at Copenhagen’s Gamle Scene, the older and smaller of Royal Danish Opera’s two opera houses, was packed with opera executives from the Opera Europa conference. Most of them will have been there with a keen eye on the staging by Anthony Almeida, his prize for winning Camerata Nuova’s 2022 European Opera-Directing Competition. They will not have been disappointed.

Almeida and designer Rosanna Vize deconstruct the isolated country house of Bly into fragments of scattered individual rooms on a stage-wide revolve, sometimes seen front on and decorated in suitably Edwardian style, sometimes in the raw plywood view you would normally only see from backstage. Aided by a couple of laptop-toting “co-ordinators”, the ghostly figures of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel make the revolve rotate at speed, creating a shifting mental quicksand in which they have embroiled the children and can now embroil the Governess. The way in which rooms and ghostly characters appear and disappear through shifting scenery is profoundly disturbing, and so is the process in Act 2 whereby the sets are gradually dismantled and removed from view by stagehands: one room at a time, in front of our eyes, the illusion of a happy home with angelic children is being stripped bare. It’s weird, it’s clever and it’s very effective.

With one major caveat, the singing was as consistently excellent as the staging was interesting. As the Governess, Clara Cecile Thomsen was bright, earnest and sweet-toned, her intonation flawless as she navigated Britten’s tricky intervals. Thomsen’s portrayal was credible at every stage of the Governess’s emotional progression from apprehension to delight to courage in the face of terror, as her assignment to look after the two children without recourse to their guardian shifts from eccentric to horrific. 

As the Prologue narrator and the ghost of Peter Quint, Fredrik Bjellsäter gave us a warm, seductive tenor, with a manner so easy and a voice so honeyed that you could easily believe that Miles would be attracted to him. I might have asked for the viciousness to be ratcheted up more when Quint turns sibilantly nasty, but that’s a minor cavil. Gisella Stille provided the perfect foil to Bjellsäter as an angular, steely Miss Jessel and Johanne Bock gave us plenty of contralto heft as the matronly housekeeper Mrs. Grose. Hannibal Skovlund Brockhoff and Barbro Citron impressed as the two children, vivid in their interplay and solid vocally. A high point, dramatically and vocally, was Brockhoff’s plaintive singing of “Malo, Malo”, Miles standing on the bed as he declares that he has turned to evil (perhaps – the words are ambiguous).

However, all the singers, with the honourable exception of Thomsen, suffered from poor diction, with very little of the English intelligible. Danish speakers could understand the dialogue from surtitles, but anyone else was forced to rely on a combination of memory of the libretto and attempts at back-translating the Danish while picking out some words of English. Virtuosic and intelligent as Almeida’s staging was, it was difficult to involve oneself thoroughly in the dramatic tension when straining to make out syllables. As for the Danes in the audience, many will have sufficient command of English to have appreciated the beauty of Myfamwy Piper’s libretto, had there been more chance to hear the words. 

Under the baton of Robert Houssart, the 14 musicians of the Royal Danish Orchestra gave a performance of Britten’s score that was enthusiastic, rather to a fault. With so few instruments painting such a broad and varied soundscape, every musician gets many moments in the spotlight and most of the interweaving lines were played with energy. But this added up to a orchestral timbre that was extremely bright throughout, with a lack of the contrasts in light and shade that this score can provide.

Horror operas are a relatively rare breed. This production is a reminder that The Turn of the Screw is a great example of what’s possible and impresses with its staging, acting and vocal qualities. But it needs greater intelligibility of words and greater nuance in the music to be a real winner.