Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, published in 1898, is one of the best ghost stories. Chilling and elusive, it has subtle psychological depths. Oscar Wilde thought it “the most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale, like an Elizabethan tragedy.”
Peter Quint, a former valet, and Miss Jessel, a former governess, return from the dead, to haunt Bly, the house in which they were once employed. They frighten the life out of the new and young governess, who senses their evil and desperately wants to protect her two young charges.
But is the paedophilic horror for real? Or is it merely in the mind of a frustrated and infatuated governess who has let her erotic fantasies get the better of her? Ever since Henry James admitted his story was “a trap for the unwary”, Freudians and anti-Freudians have had a field day, making up their minds.
Benjamin Britten’s disturbing chamber opera, with a libretto by Myfanwy Piper, is intellectually and musically satisfying. Written at speed and whilst he was in physical pain, the score, brilliant, clever, inventive, edgy, turns the screw tighter and tighter.
Duncan Ward is the conductor and I much enjoyed the music and the singing by Ailish Tynan as the Governess and Jerry Louth as the young boy. Though there are some striking projected video images by Jan Driscoll of Bly and its gardens, I didn’t enjoy Isabella Bywater’s production, which she also designed, at all.
Bywater sets the action thirty years after the events recorded by Henry James in his novella. The Governess, now middle-aged, is in a psychiatric ward and is having flashbacks and hallucinations. She thinks matron is Mrs Gosse, the Bly housekeeper.
I have seen The Turn of the Screw many times and not only as an opera but also as a play and twice as a film; but, despite this, for much of the performance at the Coliseum I was in difficulties understanding what was going on.
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