Holland Park
The Governess – Ellie Laugharne
Peter Quint – Brenden GunnellMrs Grove – Diana Montague
Miss Jessel – Elin Pritchard
The Prologue – Robin Tritschler
Miles – Dominic Lynch
Flora – Rosie Lomas
Annilese Miskimmon (director)
Leslie Travers (designs)
Mark Jonathan (lighting)
The absurdity of last year’s
Britten over-saturation seemed to prove to the converted that their hero
conquered all; to the rest of us, it confirmed us in our scepticism or, better,
selectivity. Opera Holland Park did well to defer its first staging of a
Britten opera until this year, and did better still to select The Turn of the Screw, by some distance the
finest of the composer’s operas. It is not entirely free of the mere cleverness
that bedevils many of Britten’s other scores, but the commands of construction
and form keep that and other shortcomings more or less in check throughout.
Indeed, the dialectic between the serial turnings of the screw and the
development of the story, the impedimental and yet ultimately generative grit thereby
ensured, are as much part and parcel of the drama as the ghost story itself.
A successful staging should recognise
that as much as a successful performance; at the very least, it will not stand
in the way. Anniliese Miskimmon’s production seems to me to do just that. It
provides space for the score to ‘turn’, not in a hands-off abdication of
responsibility, but with stage direction that treads a properly uneasy – and properly
productive – line between freedom and determinism, an antimony lying at the
root not only of many a philosophical problem, but equally many a dramatic
problem. Schoenberg’s
Moses und Aron is surely the
operatic exemplar in that respect, but Britten’s great respect for the Austrian
master (as well as for his pupil, Berg, whose closed forms in Wozzeck have such profound implications
for The Turn of the Screw) tends in any case to underpin, audibly and visually,
his stronger works. What might on occasion therefore seem an uncertainty as to
how the Governess is reacting, what she will do, is actually better understood
as an indication of the extent to which she is trapped. Likewise with the
premonitions of past and future, the latter presented by the directorial
innovation of an old-fashioned, blackboarded schoolroom in Leslie Travers’s
excellent designs, starkly atmospheric, with room for the drama to emerge from
between the cracks. The regimented processions of schoolboys seek not, or at
least so it seemed to me, to hammer home a point, but to present a possibility
for reflection. Who are they? Are they ‘real’, whatever that might mean? Do
they evoke a past, whether the work’s or the composer’s, a present, or a
future? Again, they work in tandem with the score.
It is more or less impossible
for us, especially in the light of recent and ongoing legal cases, not to pick
up on the barely suppressed paedophilia in Britten’s opera. That is not shied
away from, especially in the case when Miles, quite unsensationally, apparently
quite ‘naturally’, removes his shirt, ready for his bath. But again, the point
is not hammered home; it is perfectly possible for a production successfully to
highlight this element, as indeed did David McVicar’s superlative ENO staging,
but it is not the only way. Here, the space left for reflection enabled the
possibility at least – it is largely up to the audience member whether to take
it up – of asking him- or herself the difficult questions concerning personal
and social complicity. To what extent is ‘childhood’ an adult, even
voyeuristic, construct? Again, the construction of the opera, just as much as
biographical knowledge, suggests answers that many will not want to hear.
Musical performance is most
crucial of all, of course, in enabling the heightened state at which we might
be compelled to ask ourselves such questions. I was slightly disappointed – and
surprised to be slightly disappointed – at Steuart Bedford’s conducting of the
first act. It certainly was not bad, and I suspect that there was an element of
becoming used to the acoustic: both for the performers, with an audience, and
for us in the audience too. But everything seemed tighter after the interval. The
cruel, glistening beauty of Britten’s score registered more powerfully in the
City of London Sinfonia’s now-expert performance; so too did the deadly constructionism
of the composer’s musico-dramatic method. I should very much have liked to hear
the first act again, if only to discover whether a second performance would
have emerged the more tightly, or whether indeed the failing had been mine.
At the heart of the drama
stood Ellie Laugharne’s Governess. Her helplessness and her goodness – not saccharine,
but human – came across powerfully indeed, torn as she was between
incompatible, maybe impossible, paths to take. Brenden Gunnell’s Peter Quint
was eerily, at times frighteningly seductive: all too easy to succumb to, all
too difficult to pin down with simplistic oppositions between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’.
As his accomplice – or is she that at all? – Elin Pritchard’s Miss Jessel added
a feminine complication that seemed intriguingly wilder. The compromised ‘normality’
of Diana Montague’s Mrs Grose registered with startling immediacy, little short
of a master-class in the role. Robin Tritschler’s Prologue contributed
ambivalence and ambiguity from the outset: perhaps not an unreliable narrator,
but one we at least asked ourselves whether we should trust. As the children,
Dominic Lynch and Rosie Lomas both impressed greatly. Lynch’s Miles conjured up
just the right sort of all-too-pure innocence, disconcerting and provocative in
context, as surely it was for Britten. Lomas’s Flora offered an interesting
foil, slightly controlling, productively poised between ‘childhood’ and
something else. It is difficult, of course, to discern precisely where personal
performance ends and directorial conception begins; but that is the hallmark of
a fine opera production. This is certainly one of the finest performances I
have witnessed at Opera Holland Park.
