Drowning Innocence

Unforgettable mini-Turn of the Screw in Bath

Butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth: Oliver Michael (Miles) burns the Governess’s letter Picture by Ellie Kurttz

Since taking on the artistic direction of the Ustinov Studio at Bath’s Theatre Royal last year, Deborah Warner has programmed a series of recitals by her favourite singers in the intimate 123-seater space at the rear of Bath’s historic playhouse.

Some of these have focused on the works of Benjamin Britten, and Warner herself directed Phaedra, the cantata he wrote towards the end of his life for Janet Baker. Her production, starring Christine Rice as the would-be incestuous classical antiheroine, later toured to the Edinburgh Festival in a double-bill with Kim Brandstrup’s new dance piece, Minotaur, centred on Phaedra’s sister, Ariadne.

Warner’s focus on Britten has to be seen in the context of her celebrated interpretations of the composer’s large-scale operas in the most prestigious theatres - Death in Venice at English National Opera and La Scala, Milan, Billy Budd and Peter Grimes in four-way co-productions with the Royal Opera, Teatro Real Madrid, Opéra de Paris and Rome’s Teatro dell’Opera. It comes, therefore, as no surprise that she should choose The Turn of the Screw for the Ustinov Studio’s first foray into Britten’s theatrical world.

She had already directed this chamber opera at her Royal Opera debut in 1997 (at the Barbican Theatre, later revived at Covent Garden), and so she invited the young theatre-maker Isabelle Kettle to stage it in Bath, as she had Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at the Ustinov last year.