The Turn of the Screw, English National Opera, 16 October 2024

Coliseum

Images: © Manuel Harlan
Peter Quint (Robert Murray), Flora (Victoria Nekhaenko),
Miles (Jerry Louth), The Governess (Ailish Tynan)

Governess – Ailish Tynan
Flora – Victoria Nekhaenko
Mrs Grose – Gweneth Ann Rand
Miles – Jerry Louth
Miss Jessel – Eleanor Dennis
Peter Quint – Robert Murray
Prologue – Alan Oke

Director, designs – Isabella Bywater
Lighting – Paul Anderson
Projections – Jon Driscoll

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Duncan Ward (conductor)

It had been a while since I last saw The Turn of the Screw, though there was a time when it seemed quite a regular . To my mind the strongest of Britten’s operas, it was last seen at the Coliseum in an excellent staging by David McVicar: again to my mind, one of his strongest. It now returns in a new ENO production by Isabella Bywater, also designed by her, with an impressive cast conducted by Duncan Ward. 

Flora, Miles, Mrs Grose (Gweneth Ann Rand), Governess

Bywater’s production seems generally to have been well received. Whilst acknowledging her effort to bring a new standpoint to the work, I am not convinced it succeeds; at least, it did not succeed so well for me as it apparently has for many. The drama is presented in the Governess’s flashbacks from a psychiatric hospital, events at Bly presumably at least having contributed to her committal. Scenic projections onto the hospital set lead us back to the house and its grounds: to my eyes, a little clumsily. This was clearly a traumatic, horrific experience for the Governess, all the more so as presented in a finely observed, deeply compassionate performance from Ailish Tynan. There is splendidly creepy – and chillingly meaningful – children’s play, for instance with Flora and her doll.

The problem – and I am not sure this was Bywater’s intention – is that in giving the impression the events may straightforwardly have been imagined by the Governess, the drama veers in a one-sided direction that has one ultimately question what the point of it might be. Asking ‘did the Governess see the ghosts’ is of course a reasonable and indeed necessary question; proceeding as Bywater does in her programme note and also, so it seems, onstage, to ask ‘Did she have a personality disorder?’ risks missing the point. ‘Ambiguity is what makes it unsettling,’ Bywater adds. Precisely, which is why it seems an odd move to rid it of most of that ambiguity; more disturbingly, it comes close to turning the Governess’s distress into a spectacle, and eclipsing the ‘real’ question of what has been done to the children. Having the Governess imagine so much seems both implausible and undesirable. It is perfectly possible, of course, to adopt a partial standpoint; many stagings of all manner of works do, with greater and lesser success. The Turn of the Screw, however, emerges somewhat shortchanged—whilst at the same time, to be fair, far from fruitlessly interrogated. 

Tynan’s performance was absolutely central to those fruits, both detailed and skilfully sketching the broader picture. Eleanor Dennis’s Miss Jessel and Robert Murray’s Peter Quint were similarly detailed portrayals, highly commendable, though the underlying premise perhaps worked all the more against them. Gweneth Ann Rand’s Mrs Grose, by turn warm and distanced, was permitted to offer greater ambiguity. Victoria Nekhaenko’s Flora and Jerry Louth’s Miles were both excellent too, walking dramatic tightropes with great skill and credibility, the latter’s icy delivery in particular both bringing home and into question the theme of innocence’s loss in work and staging. Alan Oke’s Prologue as medical consultant offered a masterclass in diction and framing, surtitles in fact proving unnecessary throughout.

Prologue (Alan Oke)

Ward’s musical interpretation seemed to have been formulated with Bywater’s concept in mind. Especially in the first act, a looser, more rhapsodic approach, suggestive of psychological disorder and even a shift from ghost story into outright horror, was prevalent. What I missed was a stronger sense of line, of the workings of scenic and longer-term construction, so crucial to this opera’s dramaturgy. Perhaps by design, this fell into clearer focus after the interval, suggesting a conflict between freedom and determinism far from irrelevant to the musical as well as stage action. Moments of horror registered in vividly pictorial fashion, at times presaging the desiccated late world of Death in Venice; their integration in this, perhaps Britten’s most constructivist score, was less clear.

Ultimately, then, Bywater’s production did not for me cohere as well as McVicar’s more straightforward yet deeply committed production or Anneliese McKimmon’s thoughtful, more properly ambiguous staging for Opera Holland Park in 2014. Likewise, the conducting of Charles Mackerras and Steuart Bedford on those occasions did more to enable and elucidate Britten’s turning of the musical screw. I was grateful nonetheless for the opportunity to have experienced it, not least for Tynan’s gripping Governess.

Miss Jessel (Eleanor Dennis), Peter Quint, Governess

The Turn of the Screw, Opera Holland Park, 1 July 2014

Holland Park

The Governess – Ellie Laugharne

Peter Quint – Brenden Gunnell
Mrs 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)

City of London Sinfonia

Steuart Bedford (conductor)

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.     

 

The Turn of the Screw, English National Opera, 22 October 2009

The Coliseum

The Governess – Rebecca Evans
The Prologue/Peter Quint – Michael Colvin
Miles – Charlie Manton
Flora – Nazan Fikret
Mrs Grose – Ann Murray
Miss Jessel – Cheryl Barker

David McVicar (director)
Tanya McCallin (designs)
Andrew George (movement)
Sirena Tocco (movement revival)
Adam Silverman (lighting)

Orchestra of English National Opera
Sir Charles Mackerras (conductor)

I have long thought The Turn of the Screw Britten’s finest opera. It is a superior work to Peter Grimes, for instance, which boasts an excellent story, set to music of variable quality; only English insularity could possibly explain the wildly extravagant claims one often hears for it. In The Turn of the Screw, however, genuinely interesting, highly ‘constructed’, music adds to the story, engendering an artwork inevitably different from, yet far from unworthy to be ranked alongside, Henry James’s original tale.

Sir Charles Mackerras certainly made one hear Britten’s score that way. Mackerras’s was an outstanding achievement: if only he would devote, or indeed had devoted, more of his time to repertoire such as this than to his increasingly hard-driven, often downright charmless, Mozart. (A recent Don Giovanni was, I admit, something of an exception.) Here, however, the music lived, breathed, developed with deceptive ease; it responded to and incited the drama, its structure clearly delineated in musical and dramatic terms. As the conductor himself noted in a brief post-performance speech, following a presentation, there are only thirteen players in Britten’s orchestra, yet the composer suggests more extensive forces. There is no monotony but a wealth of instrumental colour and variation. Such economy undoubtedly puts Peter Grimes to shame. And the ENO orchestra was on top form. Every player might justly be mentioned, yet, if only on account of his part’s prominence, Murray Hipkin’s piano playing is perhaps worthy of especial mention.

A fine cast had been assembled. Rebecca Evans was a sympathetic Governess: victim of the supernatural or hysteric? Who knows? Her musical qualities were as high as her dramatic ones, vocal lines retaining an integrity of their own. Ann Murray was at least equally fine as Mrs Grose. Truly inhabiting the character, her suspicions, doubts, and humanity were readily apparent. Cheryl Barker had less to do as Miss Jessel, but was disturbingly malevolent on stage and in voice. I was less impressed by Michael Colvin’s Peter Quint: weird, certainly, but lacking in insidious charm. His intonation sometimes wavered too. Charlie Manton seemed a very young Miles, which has implications for how one considers the character, who thereby comes across as considerably less knowing. Nevertheless, his was a splendidly sung and acted performance, which would have put to shame many adult professional singers. Nazan Fikret seemed to me somewhat miscast as Flora; one can get away with a young Miles but a Flora who looks more than twice his age is unfortunate: a bit too much Little Britain. She sang well enough though. Female diction was not always impeccable, but I have heard far worse.

David McVicar’s production, first seen at ENO – though not by me – in 2007, and before that at the Mariinsky Theatre, is pretty much an unqualified triumph. Where I thought his Salome for the Royal Opera too sensationalist – the work hardly needs it... – this production responds to words and music in so telling a fashion, like a horribly realistic dream, that one can hardly imagine it being done otherwise afterwards. Set ‘in period’, the period is not fetishised as an end in itself, but employed as a source of strangeness. Tanya McCallin’s sets deserve credit here, likewise Adam Silverman’s lighting. All of the characters seem exceptionally well directed. The twisted nature of the story is relished – surely Daily Mail writers and readers should be protesting outside the Coliseum – without being exaggerated. Disturbing realities concerning children, their sexuality, and adults’ responses thereto are portrayed bravely and with sensitivity. If there is a problem with the ghosts, that they are perhaps too apparent, then that is inherent in the work itself. The extras’ movement was originally undertaken by Andrew George and is skilfully revived by Sirena Tocco. All told, and very much more than the sum of its parts, this was an excellent performance, wholeheartedly to be recommended.