This year’s Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, featured a world-debut production of Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera The Turn of the Screw, headed up by Rodula Gaitanou (stage direction), Yannis Thavoris (scenic and costume design), and Paul Hackenmueller (lighting design). The work is perfect for a small space—here, the historic Dock Street Theatre—and for limited personnel (six singers, thirteen instruments). The opera is an adaptation of Henry James’s 1898 novella of the same name, albeit with a number of interpretive liberties taken by Britten and the critic-turned-librettist Myfanwy Piper, and it was originally premiered as part of the 1954 Venice Biennale. A naive governess travels to rural Bly, Essex, to care for two children, who are wards of their absentee uncle, and encounters there a house haunted by the ghosts of two former employees of the estate, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel. The story that unfolds explores the loss of innocence and the struggle between good and evil.
The opera’s structure comprises a prologue; the introduction of the Screw theme; a first act of eight scenes, each divided by a variation upon the theme; and a second eight-scene act, divided in the same way. The theme itself consists of each of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale arranged in a circular series of mostly rising major fourths and falling minor thirds and fifths. The effect is a tonal illustration of the tightening down of a screw into wood. A number of motifs appear throughout the work, such as the celesta that marks Quint’s presence, which often plays two pentatonic scales against themselves. Scales are also leveled against each other in scenes: when the children sing the nursery rhyme “Lavender Blue,” its diatonic tune is set against an otherwise chromatic scene, to eerie effect. An entire essay could be devoted to the internal musical references and Britten’s allusive use of keys and his manipulation of received forms throughout the opera, but it must suffice to note that this is sophisticated music and that the Spoleto musicians played it well.
The voices of the opera are four sopranos (the Governess, Flora, Miss Jessel, and Mrs. Grose), a tenor (Peter Quint), and a treble (Miles). The male parts are particularly troublesome, as the part of Quint was written for Peter Pears’s unique voice, and the role of Miles requires significant stamina and musical education for a boy treble. Nevertheless, Omar Najmi delivered a memorable performance as Quint, powerfully executing every scene, and the young Everett Baumgarten excelled in the role of Miles as both a singer and an actor. As for the sopranos—Elizabeth Sutphen (the Governess), Maya Mor Mitrani (Flora), and Christine Brewer (Mrs. Grose)—all are very different voices, and all were well-matched for this performance. Sutphen is a lyric soprano with a full tone and vocal confidence, never stretching or stumbling in this role. Mitrani was a perfect Flora, with a voice that evenly balanced her character’s bright and childish aspects with her dark and troubled side. Brewer has been likened to the sopranos Helen Traubel and Kirsten Flagstad, and the comparison is not unfair: she has a satisfying command and roundness to her voice that set her apart in the production as a singer with experience on the stage.
The part of Miss Jessel was sung offstage by Rachel Blaustein and played onstage by Mary Dunleavy, who was recovering from an illness. This was distracting at points, especially when Jessel sings with others, but did not significantly diminish the performance as a whole.
As I sat in the Dock Street Theatre, with its dark-stained wood paneling and Colonial-style brass sconces, I thought to myself, “Only a fool would not build out from this room to form the scenes at Bly.” So I was relieved when, in the first scene of Act I, a wall constructed of identical wood paneling formed a part of the set. The other half of the set was a plastic-paneled wall that was used, thanks to smart lighting, to great success as blue sky, a mirror, a foggy wood, the window, and the tower. Above all, this wall was employed to symbolize the thin boundary between the dead and the living at Bly. Between scenes, these components were often rearranged to change setting or aspect, but much of the time the two walls were joined to form a triangle, the base of which opened to the audience, inspiring an appropriately claustrophobic, isolating view into the world of the opera.
This production’s reading of the libretto leaned decidedly towards the legitimacy of the Governess’s experience with the supernatural and of the children’s involvement in communicating with the ghosts of Jessel and Quint. In some productions—as in the novella—there is room to doubt the Governess’s sanity. Here, the children are clearly communicating with the very real phantoms of Quint and Jessel. In Act I, Scene 8 (“At Night”), the libretto has the children, trancelike, wooed from their lodgings by mirages of Quint and Jessel. In this production, the children are asleep in a bed, above which is a portrait of a couple shrouded in black. As Quint and Jessel sing to the children, they each emerge from behind the portrait and come into the bed to caress them. The scene becomes a slumber party with the specters and the children. More explicit is Act II, Scene 2 (“The Bells”), which in the libretto is set in a churchyard. In this production, the aforementioned portrait is now set up on the floor of stage right, surrounded by dozens of votive candles; at stage left, behind the plastic-paneled wall, Quint and Jessel are seated in quiet imitation of the portrait. In the libretto’s stage direction, the children simply enter “like choir boys” before sitting upon a tomb in the churchyard. In this production, as they sing their parody of the canticle Benedicite, omnia opera, they pace in opposing circles with piously clasped hands and slap right hands as they pass one another, in some mix of liturgy and play. Their behavior and singing prompts some conversation between Grose and the Governess about how “sweet” and “good” they are, but in listening to words of their parody canticle, their caretakers realize that Miles and Flora are “speaking horrors” and communicating with Quint and Jessel. A part of me likes what this production has done, but I also fear that this overt, bizarre ritual around the portrait spelled things out too clearly, distracting the audience from sharing in the gradual realization of the Governess and Grose.
A more straightforward complaint involves the decision to have the Governess kiss the window in which Quint appears in Act I, Scene 5. While this emphasizes the jealousy and sensuality shared between the characters, most productions choose something more subtle and profound: when the Governess recognizes the man from the tower in the window, she rushes outside to confront him, only to look out at the audience through the very window in which she had just seen Quint. She quite literally stands in his place.
The production was otherwise faithful to the text, and at moments it seemed to be allusive to past productions. The silhouette of a scraggly apple tree recalls one in the original 1954 Piper production, for instance, and the use of plastic panels for lighting and projection reminded me of Miller’s 1984 production with the English National Opera.
This opera—for both its intricate, intelligent construction and its morally troubling content and conclusion—is difficult for players and audience alike, but this new production is a fine example of the enduring power of The Turn of the Screw, a masterpiece of twentieth-century British opera.
