The Turn of the Screw is so dramatically economical and Britten’s music so affecting that the opera can be relied on perennially to succeed on its own terms. More explicitly than Henry James’ original, it's a story that surfaces in the polluted wake of sexual predation. Wherever you are for Britten’s most successful chamber opera, the exodus to the foyer at half time is silent, sombre, and the murmur from the woman behind you on the stairs echoes Mrs Grose's: “Dear God” The taint of whatever it is Britten has laid out before us in the first act cannot be washed away with interval drinks. The question – now that we routinely say the words aloud – is why we keep returning to immerse ourselves in an opera about the legacy of sexual abuse.
Natalie Abrahami’s mesmerising new production for at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre, in collaboration with designer Michael Levine, is very dark indeed. The Prologue is sung in total black-out. Being in a dark theatre for that long has its own eerie effect: the feeling that your own eyeballs are being sucked out in a desperate search for light, and an unexpected reconnection with a visceral childhood fear at finding oneself cast adrift in a void. The voice that anchors us may be called the Prologue but it also belongs to Peter Quint.
When Isabelle Peters appears as the Governess en route to Bly, she is just a face, Beckett-style, before eventually the darkness begins to recede as she reaches her destination and the face of her unhappy predecessor looms behind her like a malevolent thought-bubble. It’s on arrival that the unsettling double life of this production begins to reveal itself. Integral to Michael Levine’s restrained gothic set is the ingenious use of video projection that has the effect of creating two versions of what we think we’re seeing on stage. The children watch at the window for the arrival of their new governess, but we also see their preoccupied, troubled faces stare out at us in the darkness. There are things that happen in the mind unseen, and things that happen in plain sight, of which we struggle to conceive.
Abrahami has decisively captured this paralysing uncertainty. The ghosts appear at first in the corner of our eye – wait! One of the stage-hands is smoking – Quint! We see him before the Governess does. And there he is again in the schoolroom and – in the opera’s most curdling moment – just holding back from touching Miles on the shoulder, an unmissable gesture that by its dubious virtue reveals the desire in its reverse. And then there’s two of him. Abrahami understands that an abuser is everywhere and despite that they are so much with you, their power is to make you feel utterly alone. While the device works well with Quint, whose carefully drawn relationship with Miles shows us the claustrophobia of grooming, things feels a little overcrowded when pregnant Miss Jessel – surely Quint’s other victim – herself duplicates. Meanwhile, bereft of her former governess, little Flora’s only display of emotion is her twisted satisfaction at drowning her doll in the lake.
It’s at this point we realise that Levine has flooded the stage. It’s a brilliant coup de théâtre: denial made manifest. The characters must now move about apparently oblivious to being up to their ankles. Except, that is, Miles and Quint, gleefully splashing each other in play. Just for a moment, in this darkest of worlds, Quint sends an arc of water droplets into the air and they glitter like jewels.
Bassem Akiki, making his Royal Opera debut, gives Britten’s seductive and unsettling score an extra twist of cruelty. There’s a deliberate shrillness to the sound; winds are blown very hard indeed, timpani hit with vicious force, and there’s an abrasiveness in the strings that sounds Nymanesque. In the intimate confines of the Linbury, the secrets Britten committed to ledger lines more than 70 years ago emerge afresh.
Peters is a magnificent Governess, steering her voice around the emotional chicanery of this most complex character, while Kate Royal brings a darker, desolate tone to Bly’s previous incumbent. Elgan Llŷr Thomas doesn’t give Quint the scything edge that so often characterises his ‘Miles’ aria: instead, he is soft and warm.
The children are wonderful: Emilia Blossom Ostroumoff, is a bold Flora, Phoenix Matthews a study in preoccupied compliance as Miles.
Notwithstanding the welcome contribution of intimacy director Anna Morrissey to this production, the sense of voyeurism lingers. Why must we revisit this nightmare in which the guardians have turned away, the charismatic perpetrator is dead and gone and the only witnesses – silenced by their own fear and isolation – are the victims? It is a curious story…
