Ghosts in the Sanatorium

Isabellą Bywater stages Britten's The Turn of the Screw anew for English National Opera

The ceremony of innocence?: Eleanor Dennis (Miss Jessel), Robert Murray (Peter Quint), Ailish Tynan (Governess) Picture © Manuel Harlan

It IS a curious story. Benjamin Britten’s 1954 chamber opera The Turn of the Screw may have been premiered at Venice’s Gran Teatro La Fenice, but it was conceived as a touring vehicle for the composer’s English Opera Group, with an instrumentarium of only 13 players, a cast of six and no chorus. With a taut musical structure (a Bergian 12-note theme and variations, rooted provocatively in tonality) and modest duration (less than two hours), this work has long transcended the confines of ‘intimate’ music theatre and found a home in some of the world’s largest opera houses.

In recent decades English National Opera has made a speciality of Britten’s compact ghost story - based on Henry James’s eponymous novella - at the London Coliseum. In 1979 Jonathan Miller (with his then regular designers Patrick Robertson and Rosemary Vercoe) projected it into the West End’s largest auditorium with gripping impact. At least five revivals followed until 1993, showcasing, inter al, the Governesses of Jill Gomez and Valerie Masterson, and the Quints of Philip Langridge and Robert Tear. Then, in 2007 (revived two years later), David McVicar directed a new production around the fine Governess of Rebecca Evans and the Quint of Timothy Robinson. In 2018, a further new staging by Timothy Sheader joined the company’s repertoire, but ‘hors les murs’ and al fresco, in collaboration with the open-air Regent’s Park Theatre. All three productions offered new slants on Britten’s enigmatic masterpiece.