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Review by Dennis Kiddy of Britten’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’, November 2003.

A haunting experience with some bumps on the night.
Bangkok Opera’s production of The Turn of the Screw.

If the purpose of art is to make you ruminate on what you’ve experienced, then Benjamin Britten’s opera The Turn of the Screw must be among the leaders of all time. It’s a rather fetid affair. It presents an open-ended story, yet the central thrust always seems clear: wicked things have been going on involving adults and children.

Two ghosts invade the lives of four living characters who in turn trespass on each other’s personal space. Or is it their minds they’re digging into? Or are the ghosts only projections of the characters’ mental aberrations? Or maybe the living people are actually the ghosts? And so you go on, until you drop. Your mind is forced down this endless labyrinth, yet the backdrop of sexual repression, sexual abuse and sexual innuendo is the constant, harrowing factor.

In Bangkok Opera’s production, conductor Leo Phillips and his chamber orchestra of 13 instrumentalists produced a near impeccable accompaniment to this tortuous tale. All the variety and nuance that Britten ploughed into his rich score were faithfully reproduced. The stage characters are basically schizophrenic, constantly developing, and Phillips succeeded in catching all the shifts of mood, colour and pace. He was well served by his highly responsive band. All technically in command of their solo roles, they played with commitment and sensitivity to the drama unfolding around them.

For the most part, the six solo singers also served Phillips well, and there were moments of musical intensity that would have graced opera houses anywhere in the world.
Miles and Flora, the children at the centre of the dark events, have demanding roles - Britten makes little concession to age in their parts. Brendan Schatzki as Miles excelled as the tormented boy taking us disarmingly through his beautifully controlled vocal range and sinister, emotional turnabouts. His sister Flora, played by Soontharee Srisang, was a perfect coupling. She is fortunately not too tall to look physically out of character, and her purity of tone lent an outstanding musical and dramatic realism to the role.

Pradichaya Poonyarit played the ghost of Miss Jessell, the children’s former governess. She has a confident stage presence and formidable projection which were both put to memorable use. Linda Cummings as Mrs Grose, the housekeeper, sang with assurance and focused accuracy and similarly gave it all she had when the drama ran high. Clarity of diction was occasionally a problem for the adult characters, the exception being Marc Deaton playing the ghost of Peter Quint, the household’s former valet and the root of the evil. Actually, he wasn’t presented so much as a tormenting ghost as an unredeemable devil and he very wisely took his vocal and dramatic characterisation one demonic step further than is usual to keep in sync with the body paint and costume. This was a first-rate portrayal from beginning to end.

Barbara Smith Jones played the new governess charged with looking after the abandoned children. She wasn’t at ease with the part. Her lack of confidence with many entries forced her eyes to be glued on the conductor when they should have been directed at the focus of the action. She is the only character in the plot without a name implying that she’s an Everyman made up of bits of skeletons that we all recognize in ourselves. She has to regularly veer off on dramatic tangents to succeed in the part. With her eyes safety-netting on the conductor and her feet often rooted to the spot, there were few moments when she hit the required realism.

Some facets of director Somtow Sucharitkul’s production might have nudged you down previously unvisited bits of the labyrinth. Playing Quint as a complete devil was one. Having Miles entwine his hands with those of his new governess around an apple of temptation presented the lad more as an apprentice seducer than the victim of another’s charms. Dressing him later in similar style to Quint all added up nicely.

The revisionist treatment of the stage set was less convincing. I recently spent twelve months rattling around a huge house in the small English town of Aldeburgh overlooking the sea, near the house where Britten composed The Turn of the Screw fifty years ago, and I hated every minute. The relentless biting wind, the unlovable sea, the grey skies, the sluggish pebble beach, a bleak community trawling its fish against all the worst elements. The similarly oppressive house in which Britten sets his disturbing drama was refashioned as six coffin lids on an otherwise totally empty stage. Demolishing the secret-secreting walls of the haunting house in this way lost much more than it gained.

Several orchestral interludes found characters with nothing to do apart from freeze uncomfortably in dramatic stasis. Much of the action took place in front of the stage and even in the body of the auditorium. This emasculated the claustrophobia of the plot and disadvantaged those sitting near the front who couldn’t make sense of action they couldn’t see. Quint and Miss Jessel, uniting to haunt and taunt the children, were made to play the scene right in front of the orchestra, thereby dissipating the horror in a distracting haze of up-beats, down-bows, page-turning and instrument-swapping.

The strange decision to remove the string from the Cat’s Cradle scene robbed us of a simple yet telling parallel to the elusive intertwining of the characters’ threads. Flora never planted that curious kiss onto brother Miles as promised.

Mrs Grose and the governess arrived for church in their Friday frocks instead of the expected Sunday specials. During Flora’s disturbing cradling of her dolly, the governess displayed a vivid red copy of the Bangkok Post trumpeting the headline “The New Future is Here’. That’s when I got lost in the labyrinth. I hope others found their way out.

© Dennis Kiddy
1 December 2003

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