It is late 1953 and composer Benjamin Britain is behind schedule in composition of the opera which has been commissioned by the Venice Biennale and is due to première in September 1954 in the city’s historic Teatro La Fenice. He is having problems writing for a central character, Miles, a young boy dismissed from his boarding school for unnamed misdemeanours.
The opera is, of course, The Turn of the Screw, based on Henry James’s novella in which ghostly apparitions of a dead valet and governess seem to exert a sinister influence over the boy and his young sister.
Kevin Kelly’s play follows the relationship between Britten and twelve-year-old David Hemmings, the boy cast as Miles, from the auditions when he was chosen, through his training for the role up to its Fenice performance and the situation when Hemmings goes to live in close proximity in the Aldeburgh home that Britten shares with his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, who will sing valet Quint in the opera.
It was a situation that would raise eyebrows now (could training become grooming?) and this was happening when some high profile prosecutions saw the authorities harshly enforcing the law against homosexuality, and Britten and Pears's relationship was hardly a secret in the world they moved in.
Britten and Pears had separate designated bedrooms, but Pears is well aware of the ways the police might seek for evidence of sexual activity, and Britten’s obsession with young David could be too easily confused with the subtext of James’s novella. Kelly makes him explain it as an attraction to an angelic innocence just before the pubertal transition to manhood, but Pears can’t help feeling jealous, though reassured of Ben’s love.
Kelly gives Britten his own nightmares; their acting out is a jarring feature of Tim McArthur’s fluid, simply-mounted production, but jarring they would be. He suggests Pears should get married, which would give them a 'beard', and propositions Imogen Holst as a potential bride, though she, who had sidelined her own composing to support him, thinks this is asking too much.
The Britten-Pears partnership is effectively presented, and one get a strong sense of the protective cocoon that Britten’s associates seemed to build round him, but at the heart of this play is the Britten-Hemmings relationship. Hemmings always denied that anything improper ever happened, and with this production beginning with him looking back years later (which solves the problem of casting an adult who doesn’t then have to sing a fake treble), that is the line it appears to take but not without question.
At auditions, it isn’t Hemmings’s voice that makes such an impression on Britten (who is confident he can teach him to sing the role), it is his rough-edged personality. Gary Tushaw (as Britten) and Liam Watson (as Hemmings) present a fascinating picture of their interaction with Simon Willmont warily watching as Pears. The opera’s director Basil Coleman becomes the nearest to an outside observer. He had directed previous work by Britten, but there seems a slight sense of a falling out. Is that why Jonathan Clarkson also plays his nightmare nemesis?
As it happens, I worked with the English Opera Group on this production of Britten’s opera, though a year or more later when they took it to Paris and Aldeburgh, when Peter seemed even more protective of a more nervous Britten, and a very knowing teenage David sometimes a disruptive handful, while lovely Imo was a touch more eccentric than Jo Wickham makes her.
These are actors creating characters not impressionists. They create their own world, but seeing Imo teaching David the piano variation, I remembered my amazement at his keyboard skill, and the ominous sound of James Blades's fingers on drum-skin for those final moments still gives me a shiver.
The quotes from the score that are used here have their own resonance, but I learned things too. The opening words of “a curious story” being a contribution from Hemmings, the suggestion that the meanings of Malo, the Latin grammar mnemonic that Miles sings, are doubled with sexual slang terms, and amusingly that the boy whose audition followed Hemmings’s was the young Michael Crawford. Kevin Kelly has packed a lot into just under 90 minutes.
Peter Pears was worried about rumours. Turning the Screw doesn’t entirely scotch them, but it gives us a picture of a mutual fascination that helped to create a musical masterpiece.