The Turn of the Screw review – a beautiful and unsettling piece of theatre

‘A deliberate, powerful and horribly successful study of the magic of evil,” is how one critic described Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw on its publication in 1898. The same words very much apply to Louisa Muller’s new Garsington staging of Britten’s opera, a beautiful, unsettling piece of theatre that sifts through the work’s ambiguities with a subtlety that in itself has something of the complex finesse of James’s prose.

Muller cleverly exploits the fact that we are watching the opera in what is effectively a glasshouse as daylight wanes and shadows naturally deepen. She reimagines the Prologue as the encounter between the Governess (Sophie Bevan) and the children’s guardian, reminding us that her obsession with the latter is integral to how she thinks and feels throughout. Bly House, wonderfully designed by Christopher Oram, is a dilapidated baroque pile, where Ed Lyon’s Quint and Katherine Broderick’s Miss Jessel prowl by day and night, their relationship in death replicating the emotional hell of their lives.

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We never find out exactly what happened between the ghosts and the children (Leo Jemison and Adrianna Forbes-Dorant) in the past, though it is clear their influence lingers into an unhappy present. The gradual erosion of the Governess’s mind and integrity, however, is observed in often excruciating detail. At the end, it is very apparent that her own moral corruption equals that of the “horrors”, real or imagined, that she has sought to destroy.

Bevan gives an extraordinary performance, sung with an almost radiant assertiveness that makes the Governess’s self-deception all the more disquieting. Lyon and Broderick are superb as Quint and Jessel; his insidious coloratura, gloriously negotiated, offsets her implacable, almost Wagnerian delivery. Jemison and Forbes-Dorant are exceptional: the deep sadness of his Malo song really breaks your heart. Kathleen Wilkinson makes a fine Mrs Grose, her steely authority barely masking her weakness of will. In the pit, meanwhile, Richard Farnes, conducting the Garsington Opera Orchestra, inexorably ratchets up the tension while exploring every detail of Britten’s remarkable instrumentation. A truly great achievement, devastating and unforgettable.

• At Garsington, Wormsley, until 19 July.