Britten’s Turn of the Screw

London Colosseum - 31/10/24

 English National Opera Orchestra (conductor: Charlotte Corderoy) and soloists.

It was encouraging to see the London Colosseum packed to capacity for the final night of Isabella Bywater’s deservedly well-received production of Britten’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’, adapted from Henry James’s disturbing, ambiguous novella. Evenings like this remind you of what a treasure English National Opera is, and how grievous the government and arts establishment’s escalating defunding of ENO and the sector as a whole really is.

 Halloween (and, simultaneously, All Hallows Eve) seemed appropriately overlapping occasions on which to bow out this haunting tale of a saintly – or perhaps crazed – governess desperate to protect her two innocent young wards from ghostly evil, with a teasing and disturbingly uncertain outcome. The word ‘apparently’ is one that continually comes to mind in seeking to describe the action, which unfolds from a prologue into 15 scenes across two acts, punctuated by 16 poignant orchestral interludes.

 Ostensibly, what we are dealing with here is the culturally saturating Victorian haunted house obsession. But as with Britten’s wonderfully affecting music, the interplay between reality and illusion, experience and imagination is never finally resolved. There is no chorus to illuminate or ruminate on the plot. Instead, the seven singers and three actors weave in and out of each other’s paths, musically and narratively.

 Essentially, Britten has constructed a series of mystical variations on a theme and sub-theme stated in carefully arranged tone-rows at two crucial points in the drama. Extended piano sections (only faintly accompanied) map out the contours of psychological intensity that run through the whole opera. These resources were well-marshalled by Charlotte Corderoy.  

 Schoenberg may have been mythically mistaken in imagining that one day working people would be merrily whistling his obtuse dodecaphonic creations on their way to work, but Britten’s cleverly diatonic use of serial technique in ‘The Turn of the Screw’ had several people sitting around me humming the tune to the Latin ditty ‘Malo’ after the last curtain call at the end, so infectious was it.

 Extraordinarily, the composer put together most of the music for this one hour 40-minute opera in just four months. The orchestration is tight and the instrumentation delicate, light and pastel, but with moodiness and melancholy built in at every turn. It is almost incidental music in places, though with each note beautifully considered. The libretto by Myfanwy Piper sticks closely to James, apart from giving voice to the ghosts.

 The music to accompany the children, Miles and Flora (Jerry Louth and Victoria Nekhaenko), is almost gamelan-adjacent in conjuring an atmosphere of disturbed innocence. Ailish Tynan and Gweneth Ann Rand (the unnamed governess and the housekeeper Mrs Grose, respectively) gave beautifully balanced performances. Robert Murray is suitably menacing (as dark former manservant Peter Quint), along with former ENO Harewood Artist Eleanor Dennis as foreboding ex-governess Miss Jessel.

 The moveable physical set for the house is taken into different scenarios, outside and inside, by the effective use of overlaid still and moving images. These are monochrome, but the eye is almost deceived into thinking the tree-laden groves around Bly are pale green. This helps transmit an uncertainty, creepiness and final blurriness to the whole story and its operatic retelling.

 So what is this unspoken evil? Is the unnamed horror child abuse? It is difficult to watch ‘The Turn of the Screw’ these days without asking that question. Both composer and librettist were preoccupied with the tortuous, deceptively playful layering of shade and light, evil and good, in many other ways, too.

 Bywater’s location of the story in an institution where the former governess is now a patient, with events evolving from her voice and from the “curious tale” the narrator reads at the beginning, ingeniously holds together the archetypal fragments by which to face the challenges raised by this significant work.