Who are the ghosts who haunt two orphaned children and their governess in a country house? Our response to Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw (1954) always gravitates back to one question. The more you encounter this enigmatic chamber opera, the less the exact nature of the eerie dead couple, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, matters. Based on Henry James’s novella of 1898, this is a work of fiction so anything can be true. Let them be ghosts. Britten, like James, was concerned with the immortality of the soul, and the stain of evil in our “green twilight” world (James’s phrase, not that of Britten’s librettist, Myfanwy Piper). Fantasy or truth, it leaves us uneasy.
An arresting new production by Isabelle Kettle for the Ustinov Studio, the intimate space behind Bath’s Theatre Royal, gave full rein to the work’s mysteries with the simple trick of placing Quint and Jessel behind a transparent curtain. Perhaps Kettle and her designer, Charlotte Henery, had read the work of James’s brother, William James. The pioneering psychologist spent years seeking empirical evidence for the existence of ghosts. Our waking mind, he argued, is separated from other kinds of consciousness by “the flimsiest of screens”.
