Turn of the Screw, Holland Park, review: 'enthralling'

Although the Jacobean façade of Holland House might easily pass for the spookily dilapidated country house in which The Turn of the Screw is set, this production of Britten’s great opera has other ideas.

Its director Annilese Miskimmon and her designer Leslie Travers fill the stage with a bare-walled old-fashioned schoolroom furnished only with desk, chairs and blackboard. The narrator of the prologue (Robin Tritschler, singing with effortless elegance) is a white-coated science teacher of the mid 20th-century, overseeing a snake of adorable little boys in grey flannels and peaked caps — one of them in particular seems to captivate him, and they hold each other’s gaze.

This inconclusive but oddly resonant drama frames and haunts what is otherwise a more familiar interpretation of the opera, in which the hysterical Governess fights two antagonistic ghosts for the souls of her two possibly corrupted, possibly innocent pupils.

Although this schoolteacher provides another frisson of dark implication, I wasn’t convinced that Miskimmon knew quite what to do with him: significantly, his strange intrusions cease during the opera’s last 20 minutes as the ironic tragedy of the Governess’ moral victory is foregrounded. The mystery lingers.

Singing with bell-like clarity, Ellie Laugharne makes a painfully isolated and more than usually sympathetic Governess; her hesitant writing of the hopeless letter to the children’s guardian becomes a cry from a sincerely troubled heart and the production’s emotional centre.

She is strongly contrasted with her mirror image, Elin Pritchard’s ruthless Miss Jessel, the speak-no-evil Mrs Grose of Diana Montague, who clearly knows more than she lets on, and Rosie Lomas’ brazen red-haired Flora — a girl with no intention of kowtowing, who escapes and survives.

What chance do these women have against the spell of Brenden Gunnell’s seductive Peter Quint? Pied Piper to Dominic Lynch’s introverted Miles, he is someone whose sensuality is uninhibited and whose will is controlling — the image of him slouching insouciantly in Miles’ bath is particularly telling.

This finely tuned cast, all vocally first-rate, benefits from the sensitive conducting of Britten’s former colleague Steuart Bedford and the delicate playing of the City of London Sinfonia. A substantial percentage of the audience may have started off thinking that they were in for a bumpy ride through “one of these weird modern operas” (as I heard some grumpy City type describe it in the bar beforehand), but before long they were enthralled.