★★★★☆
Like cricket, opera can be a day/night game. And as English National Opera’s first excursion into Regent’s Park proves, that works perfectly when you are staging probably the creepiest opera yet written.
The light fades on Soutra Gilmour’s set — a suitably decrepit Victorian glasshouse in the middle of reed marshes — just as certainty and normality fade in Henry James’s ghost story, and Britten’s sparse but supercharged chamber-music score becomes increasingly suggestive of evil forces insidiously whittling away the sanity of trusting innocents.
Who, though, is evil and who innocent? In James’s novella a masterly ambiguity leaves all options chillingly open. Britten loads the psychological dice by giving voices, and indeed bodies, to the ghosts, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel.
Directing this staging,