Ghosts, madness and innocence: Britten at the ENO
Ailish Tynan ENO’s The Turn of the Screw 2024 © Manuel Harlan
Britten’s Turn of the Screw — based on a novella by Henry James — is a gripping drama that leaves the reader unsure whether the ghosts are real or figments of the main character’s imagination. She, the governess, has been hired to care for two orphans, Miles and Flora living at a large country house. The former governess Miss Jessel and the manservant Peter Quint, who seem to have been in a relationship together, have died, and the young governess is determined to be a calming influence on children who have suffered great loss. Unfortunately the ghosts of Quint and Jessel play havoc with the governess’s good intentions.
Britten’s idée fixe in this opera is the destruction of innocence, well phrased by Quint and Miss Jessel in Act II, Scene 1: “The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” These words emphasise the suffering Miles and Flora have faced, and suggest that worse is yet to come. The phrase itself comes not from the Henry James story, but from The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats, and beautifully complements the opera.
The music is key to the events, and a phrase of four notes at the start of the score recurs time and again. As the song of ghosts, it has been there all along. Concealment versus confession is a running theme, well suited to Britten’s genius, which flourished in a lifelong relationship with the tenor Peter Pears, still proscribed in the days of the opera’s composition.
In the original production, the roles of Quint and the governess were given definitive performances that have stood for all time, and though Quint may be an evil character, his melismatic farewell was written for Peter Pears, and is very attractive. Good and evil, innocence and experience, we embody both, but are the ghosts real, or is the governess delusional and do the ghosts only exist in her mind? A good staging of this opera should leave the audience to decide for itself, as in any great art, but sadly this production by Isabella Bywater leaves little to the imagination.
As a creator of opera designs, Bywater has produced some very ingenious ones, but in this case the mystery of what is going on in the governess’s mind is entirely lost. The staging is placed thirty years after the events, with the governess now a middle-aged woman incarcerated in a mental hospital. The events themselves are supposedly flashbacks and hallucinations.
However, the mystery remains in the words and music. The orchestra played with consummate skill under the baton of Duncan Ward. Singing too was excellent, with Alan Oke delivering the prologue, Robert Murray an attractive Quint (both roles often given by the same singer), and Jerry Louth and Victoria Nekhaenko as Miles and Flora. The middle-aged, frumpy looking governess in the mental hospital was well sung by Ailish Tynan, the housekeeper Mrs Grose by Gweneth Ann Rand, and Eleanor Dennis sang beautifully as Miss Jessel.
The Turn of the Screw is a superbly disturbing opera, one of Britten’s finest works. A simple staging with the right lighting can be extremely effective, but this production was too clever by half.
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