Review: Intriguing dark and disturbing production, Opera UCT’s The Turn of the Screw

Opera UCT is presenting Benjamin Britten’s 1954 opera, The Turn of the Screw, for a short season at the Baxter Theatre. The season opened last night, November 20, 2024 and runs until Saturday – November 23. There are two casts. The opera is an ambitious choice for a student opera production – with technically taxing roles and complex themes. Bravo to Opera UCT for tackling this dark opera with Britten’s jarring and jagged score which is threaded with refrains from nursery rhymes. It is very creepy. It left me feeling very uneasy.

Britten composed music for the chamber opera, with the libretto by Myfanwy Piper. They based their opera on the Henry James 1898 novella, The Turn of the Screw. This was my first time seeing the opera. The story tracks the journey of a young and innocent governess who is dispatched to Bly, a country house to look after two orphaned children, Miles and Flora. Their guardian is absent. She has been instructed to not bother him and refrain from contacting him. She is all alone – cut off from her social class – in this big rambling house, which appears to be haunted. Her only ally is the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose (at least in the beginning). The governess become convinced that the ghosts of two of the estate’s former employees, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, are luring the children into a world of evil.

In the Henry James novella, it has been debated whether the ghosts were “real” or imagined as a result of madness and psychosis by the governess. In Britten’s opera, we see the ghosts. They are manifested on the stage, suggesting that they are there physically. As for this production, British director Harriet Taylor reflects in her programme notes: “The first thing everyone asks you when you’re going to direct this piece is ‘So are the ghosts real or not?!”. Taylor says that in this production, they have embraced “the ambiguity central to both Henry James novella and to Britten’s interpretation”. She says: “Here ghosts are both supernatural apparitions and manifestations of very real trauma – at once intangible and influential”.

Watching, I was convinced of the presence of the ghosts. In this production, for me the ghost story of Turn of the Screw becomes horror story. It is a labyrinth, a nightmare which the governess has been snared in and cannot get out. She is young and innocent and freaks out in dealing with it all. At one point, she asks if she is mad or if they (the children) are mad. It’s a hectic backstory that she is faced with in the ghosts, Peter Quint and Mrs Jessel. Peter Quint was the valet of the estate. Mrs Jessel was the governess. They had an affair. It didn’t end well. She died under mysterious circumstances. Now they united as ghosts as they kerfuffle with the children who exist in the earthly world. Mrs Jessel becomes an ally partner to her abuser, Quint. This production is oozing in trauma – sexual and societal. Of course the traumatised children won’t tell the governess what happened to them and the abuse that they went through in the hands of Quint and Mrs Jessel. One can imagine. They are clearly terrified and a bit on autopilot, numbed to what occurred.

The opera is a tussle between good versus evil and innocence versus corrupted and this comes across strongly in this house of death. Marcel Meyer’s stark set design was influenced, he told me by monuments to death – mausoleums- with hard edges and blocks.  He has enclosed the action with a white frame. The protagonists are trapped in in the house of death and cannot escape their destiny. Striking lighting by Luke Ellenbogen jolts one -the house lights go on at points – bathing the audiences in a blinding glare.

The Opera UCT singers are in fine form and the child singers deliver charming performances. At the opening night, there were issues with sound as we frequently battled to hear. Hopefully that can be sorted out. There are surtitles – English and isXhosa – to refer to but that means pulling one’s gaze away from the stage and looking up.  The UCT Chamber Orchestra conducted by Jeremey Silver is a treat as it interprets Britten’s pounding and dissonant score. This intriguing production is deeply disturbing and dark and left with me with a lot to mull over.

✳ The Turn of the Screw by Benjamin Britten, staged by Opera UCT, November 20–23, 2024. Image supplied.