Isabella Bywater, both director and designer of ENO’s new production of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, based on Henry James’s 1898 ambiguous gothic novella, has set it in a mental asylum in the early 1960s with flashbacks to the 1930s. Britten first heard and read the novella in 1933; his opera opened at La Fenice on 14 September 1954 and in London 6 October.
Time is a factor, and I might add incongruity to ambiguity in Bywater’s retelling. Is Bywater psychoanalysing a ghost story or guiding us towards our own analysis, which is indeed James’s notion—to leave it to the individual reader for the final piece of the complicated jigsaw. If Bywater sets out to confuse, she seems to have succeeded. One can’t trust the disturbed mind of the anonymous Governess.
Using video and Hitchcockian (Vertigo, Spellbound) cinematography to suit Britten’s escalating ‘cinematic’ score, the swirling camera simulates the Governess’s spinning brain. Jane Eyre it is not, though the original novella is decidedly Brontë-esque. Is the Governess obsessed by her rich mysterious employer? Is this the beginning of her fantasising? Or is it loneliness?
Bywater has given the supernatural an art house film, surrealist veneer with Jon Driscoll’s projection designs. Walls move and overlap, the monochrome pictures in her head range from exterior and interior of a palatial country house with lake, to graveyard and church, from servant quarters to hospital ward. There’s a television, too, on which some children’s film is playing—too tiny to see, but relevant, I’m sure.
But in her pink dress and pink fluffy mules, soprano Ailish Tynan’s Governess looks more a Hilda Baker than a woman of the classroom, teaching Latin, no less. Is she imagining the dead, former valet Peter Quint and governess Miss Jessel? Do the children see them, too? Can she save them from evil? It seems James based his ghost story on an anecdote told him by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Is this why she becomes like the woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 short story The Yellow Wallpaper? Did James know it? The poster and programme front cover image shows the profile of a woman with four floors of a house superimposed on her head. Images overlap: we have to be quick on our toes to keep up. I’m ambivalent about it. Weren’t women considered hysterics once upon a time?
She doesn't fit into the isolated milieu she has entered. The creepy children—they serve in church—run rings round her. Only the housekeeper Mrs Grose (soprano Gweneth Ann Rand voice rich and warm) is sympathetic.
The children (both in remarkable voice, full of future promise, Jerry Louth singularly contained as Miles and Victoria Nekhaenko as Flora too old for her years… and that hideous horror doppelgänger doll she carries) have a secret and keep it well. Almost. Clues abound on the stage and in the music—children’s ditties and nursery rhymes amusingly incorporated into Britten’s witty score.
What happened with the previous governess, Miss Jessel (soprano Eleanor Dennis looks the part with a voice that would harbour no nonsense), and the deceiver valet, Peter Quint (tenor Robert Murray)? Sexual abuse is hinted at in the original, corruption of innocents; here it is explicit, and I wish it weren’t. The mystery is replaced by repulsion.
A chamber opera with only thirteen musicians and six singers (counting the children)—Bywater has added three actors and tenor Alan Oke to sing a prologue, the patient’s journal… The music is much simpler with its interludes, from bucolic to seductive to sinister, gently turning the screw of intensity. I can’t take my eyes off conductor Duncan Ward, making his ENO debut, his face so expressive of the musical journey: he is totally immersed.
Amazingly, they fill an auditorium the size of the Coliseum’s with just two violins, viola, cello, double bass, flute (birdsong), oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, percussion, harp and piano / celeste. Miles ‘plays’ the piano to distract the Governess as Flora escapes.
The first act ends with Miles singing “I am bad’, the second with the Governess echoing his satirical “Malo”, his dead body in her arms. Malo Miles, evil Miles—smoke rises from underneath him… is he going to hell?
The battle over his soul, good over evil, finally destroys him. And her. She loves the children, now Miles is dead and Flora hates her. She has been confined to an asylum, whether in actual fact or in her own mind. She has lost her innocence. Quint has won.
The programme is well worth buying for its erudite articles and extracts from Britten’s diaries and letters.