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Written by
Benjamin
Britten
Conducted by
Daniel
Harding
Cast
Myfanwy
Piper
Joan Rodgers
Ian Bostridge
Jane Henschel
Vivian Tierney
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Royal
Opera House
Covent
Garden
7 - 16
January 2002 |
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Henry James'
novella The
Turn of the Screw, written
in 1898, was made into into an opera
by Benjamin Britten in 1954, with
a libretto by Myfanwy Piper. James
had adapted the conventional Victorian
ghost story into a genuinely frightening
tale of child abuse, and to the horror
of children being tormented and seduced
was added a yet further twist –
their becoming drawn into fascinated
enthralment to their abusers. Horridly
beautiful, Britten's music auditorily
realises what James describes. Harp,
gong, celesta and glockenspiel eerily
glimmer and vibrate with dissonant
sweetness, and nursery rhymes and
hymns are suddenly jerked into obscene
musical and verbal travesty. The ambiguity
is all the more disquieting because
of Britten's own paederastic tendencies.
What was shocking
at the end of the 19th and middle
of the 20th centuries still disturbs
at the beginning of the new milennium
in Deborah Warner's production at
the Royal Opera House (actually a
revival of her 1997 Barbican production).
Without melodrama or violence, it
subtly conveys the melodic and psychological
jolts, the sickening swings between
innocence and corruption, of both
James's description and Britten's
music. 'I remember the whole beginning
as a succession of flights and drops,
a little see-saw of the right throbs
and the wrong', says the never-named
governess in James's story as she
sets off in a 'bumping swinging coach'
to the country estate where she is
to be employed. In this production,
as the governess (Joan Rodgers) sings
of her new appointment, a screen suddenly
jerks down behind her on which are
then projected jolting, shifting fields
and woods which flank the coach .Britten's
music frequently veers between manic
and petrified motion, and Warner has
given each of the protagonists a clearly
defined way of moving so that their
progress through the opera is a closely
choreographed dance. Their movements,
as they emerge from and disappear
into the often moonlit fir forest
at the back of the stage (a bristling
id) are slantingly reflected in the
glassy depths of the stage, visually
evoking a key theme: everything is
not what it seems, but has unforeseen
angles and abysses.
The two children,
Miles and Flora, are first seen frolicking
in almost clicheed childishness, Flora
(brilliantly acted by Caroline Wise)
incessantly doing cartwheels and running
around behind the adults holding a
doll. As the opera progresses, her
elusive darting about comes to seem
manic rather than playful, and, like
the froth of her petticoats as her
legs splay apart, to be a sinister
caricature of standard childish innocence.
The closeness of the children (Flora
whispering in Miles's ear, or whacking
him with a plank while singing 'Tom,
Tom the piper's son') appears both
collusive and malignant. The governess
becomes aware that a man is lurking
around the children, and discovers
that he is Peter Quint, a disgraced
former servant who has died in an
accident. Ian Bostridge as Quint sings
with an eerily pure, feminine plangency,
and strides restlessly about the stage,
as haunted as the boy he haunts. The
fact, serendipitously, that he is
a slender handsome young man with
a floppy forelock, like a disgruntled
student in the 1970s, only makes him
more sinister, yet also touching.
Soon Miss Jessel, the dead ex-governess,
emerges from the fir forest to haunt
Flora. She too is bitterly unhappy
and her sense of evil is exacerbated
by the way she walks in an oddly impeded
manner kicking her skirts from below
her knees as if joylessly wading through
treacle. The first act culminates
in a horrifying scene – the children
have been drawn out-of-doors at night,
and lie on the ground convulsing zombie-like
in stiff distortions as the ghosts
sing to them and they sing back. The
blend of Ian Bostridge's adult and
Julian Leang's boy's voice is both
exquisite and a travesty of the usual
duet which blends male and female
voices.
In the second
act the quasi-realism of the set has
been abandoned, as the rather statutory
custom is, for more wholesale fantasy,
but effectively. Planks and ropes
ends now hang in front of the forest.
The ropes have hand-like tops where
they attach to the planks, and one
after another twitch slightly as if
possessed. The governess and the housekeeper,
Mrs Grose, struggle to save the children,
who increasingly, and in the end irredeemably,
are in thrall to their ghostly abusers.
Ultimately Flora's caricatured frolicking
is replaced by a yet worse rebarbative
hunched stillness, as she sits between
the legs of Miss Jessel, her head
tilted sideways. 'Nasty!' and 'I don't
like you' she hurls at the governess
she once loved. Miles has abandoned
his loose boyish movement for a stiff
stride resembling Quint's. In the
final scene the governess sings in
anguish as she holds the boy in her
arms, knowing that he is lost.
This is a
wonderful production, a finely choreographed
portrayal of encroaching evil, with
glorious singing, especially by Ian
Bostridge and Joan Rodgers. It was
a pity, though, that the lack of surtitles
deprived us of the full benefit of
Piper's extraordinary libretto.
Jane O'Grady
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