The Turn of the Screw review – creepy and challenging, ENO’s new Britten staging is an ambiguous triumph

Coliseum, London
Isabella Bywater’s intelligent and demanding production injects fresh menace into Henry James’s tale of a ghosts and dark histories

These days, the Turn of the Screw has become an operatic standby. So you might think it would be hard to inject freshly original layers of menace into Benjamin Britten’s claustrophobically taut adaptation of Henry James. Isabella Bywater has nevertheless found a way in her production for English National Opera. Not every idea lands, but in this intelligent and demanding production, the big one does, and its implications ripple across the whole evening.

Does anyone other than the governess see the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel who appear to drive the tragedy at Bly? In his novella, James never provides an answer to this key question. To put the story on the stage, however, Britten and his librettist Myfanwy Piper required Quint and Miss Jessel to be visible, to interact, and to sing. This can turn the governess’s role into a one-woman rescue mission, as she tries to break the ghosts’ hold on her charges, Miles and Flora.

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