The Turn of the Screw review – compelling, challenging and creepy

Jonathan Kent’s 2006 Glyndebourne production of Britten’s Henry James adaptation is now on its third revival as part of this autumn’s tour. Musically, it’s strong, and in some ways strikingly different to what we’ve heard before. Britten wrote the role of the Governess for Jennifer Vyvyan, a noted Mozartian, and the first of a long sequence of fine lyric sopranos to be associated with the work. Here, however, we have the altogether more dramatic Natalya Romaniw, whose repertoire embraces Puccini and Wagner, and whose vocal weight, together with flashes of self-righteous anger as well as fear, provide novel and challenging insights into Britten’s depiction of the erosion of his heroine’s soul.

There’s admirably taut conducting from Leo McFall. Anthony Gregory’s Quint, younger and handsomer than most, sounds disquietingly beautiful, which makes him very creepy indeed. Anne Mason is the slightly obsequious, tellingly unimaginative Mrs Grose, Miranda Keys the self-dramatising, if occasionally melodramatic Miss Jessel. The children, Thomas Delgado-Little as Miles and Louise Moseley as Flora, are utterly convincing, and rarely, I suspect, have been bettered.

Kent’s 1940s-set staging still has its inequalities, though the awkward equation of Bly with Glyndebourne itself has been toned down. Kent is at his best in his treatment of the children, where we, like the Governess, are left bewildered as to whether or not they have been genuinely exposed to an inappropriate world of adult knowledge. The physicality of the ghosts, however, together with the odd disparity between Quint as insidious charmer and Miss Jessel as Hammer-horror wraith, isn’t ideally successful, and the most disturbing scene in the entire staging – Quint’s frightful incursion into the children’s bathroom – takes place too early on. Musically, however, it’s compelling, despite its dramatic flaws.