English National Opera – Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, ENO’s new staging by Isabella Bywater, conducted by Duncan Ward, with Jerry Lewis, Victoria Nekhaenko, Alan Oke, Ailish Tynan, Gweneth Ann Rand, Robert Murray and Eleanor Dennis

Benjamin Britten
The Turn of the Screw – opera in a prologue and two acts. Libretto by Myfanwy Piper, after the novella by Henry James [sung in English with English surtitles]

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

Chamber ensemble from English National Opera Orchestra
Duncan Ward

Isabella Bywater – Director and Designer
Paul Anderson – Lighting designer
Jon Driscoll – Video projection designer

At one point early in the second part of The Turn of the Screw, the distraught Governess sings ‘But who would believe my story?’ in Britten’s version of Henry James’s ghost story about the orphaned young brother and sister possessed by the spirits of two dead servants in the remote grand house of Bly. In Isabella Bywater’s new staging for English National Opera, the Governess has had much time to reflect on the events at Bly thirty years earlier, now as a patient in an asylum in the 1950s. As Bywater makes distressingly clear, the Governess’s sad past and sadder present are fatally indistinguishable from each other.

Britten’s eerie masterpiece has gathered some outstanding productions – recently ENO’s at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre and at Garsington, for example – and Bywater’s is another, a marvel of connective, nudging imagination that seems to expand Britten’s relatively short score into something timeless. And it is very haunting – remarkably so, given the impression that the more Britten and the librettist Myfanwy Piper dared to ‘solidify’ James’s story with ghosts that sing and a score of supernatural clarity, the harder it became to get a firm grasp on its dark implications to do with sexual obsession, abuse, menace and madness. 

In her role as director/designer, Bywater has taken this further in her set, split into an institutional office (complete with a flickering 1950s television) on one side and two hospital beds on the other with lots of doors and windows, where an asylum doctor delivers the scene-setting Prologue as a review of the Governess’s case-notes to a nurse. The set may be solid, but it is easily relegated to the role of backdrop for an astonishingly atmospheric, monochrome video projection (by Jon Driscoll) of the house of Bly. From its noble park and architecture to its dank cellars and Max Escher-like endless staircases. With the characters (with a little back-up from three actors) slipping seamlessly from one reality to another, as when the two ghosts, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, as asylum patients sit in on the Governess’s schoolroom class to Miles and Flora, the children. Perhaps it was sometimes hard to tell who was who, but for the most part it was technically highly accomplished and directed, and notably well-lit by Paul Anderson – including an inspired revolving night-light casting shadows of monsters – all of it leaving you with things on the periphery of vision, and adding layer upon layer of dread.

As Miles and Flora, Jerry Louth and Victoria Nekhaenko portrayed the children’s private world of ritualised games and manipulative loyalties with terrible accuracy, Miles’s slinky, impossibly seductive waltz (’So, my dear, we are alone’) announcing his final showdown with Quint and the Governess, and Flora’s fury with the Governess both unforgettable. Gweneth Ann Rand engaged beautifully as Mrs Grose the Bly housekeeper, both steadfast and out of her depth, as well as becoming one of the bed-bound figures obsessing the Governess’s fantasies. The role of the previous governess Miss Jessel – who we infer drowned herself when she became pregnant by Quint – can seem rather tacked on, but not so in Eleanor Dennis’s harrowing portrayal of a woman betrayed and destroyed. Robert Murray’s Peter Quint, dressed in an anonymous suit, sang his ‘Miles’ melisma-like distant trumpet fanfares, and he somehow made Quint both dominant and remote, even in his brief but savage sexual collision with Miss Jessel. Given Bywater’s retrospective staging, perhaps Alan Oke’s Prologue should have opened ‘It was a curious story’ (rather than ‘is’), but he drew us in irresistibly. Ailish Tynan was a pathetic, deluded, mousy Governess who triumphed completely at convincing us of her certainties about ghosts only she could see, and consoling herself with sexual fantasies for the children’s (unseen) uncle and guardian. It was a stupendous, meticulously crafted performance both psychologically and musically.

As if to prove that the more you add to this opera the more elusive it becomes, the thirteen-strong ensemble effortlessly characterised their music as well as giving a spine-tingling presence to the words, crafted with expert breadth and feeling by the conductor Duncan Ward in an auspicious ENO debut.