Britten: The Turn of the Screw – Kent and Hrůša

Britten knew exactly what he was doing when he called it a screw. The mechanism tightens, turn by turn, and you can feel the pitch rising — psychologically, harmonically, dramatically — until something has to give. Whether that something is the children’s innocence, the Governess’s sanity, or our own comfortable assumptions about what ghosts are made of: that’s the question The Turn of the Screw has been asking since its Venice premiere in 1954, and it still doesn’t answer cleanly. That’s the genius of it.

This Blu-ray production — Jonathan Kent directing, Jakub Hrůša in the pit — begins with a provocation. Toby Spence is already on stage when the house lights are still up, the audience still murmuring and settling. He’s in a sweater and jeans, holding a pile of letters, reading to himself. The temporal displacement is immediate and deliberate: this isn’t the Victorian gothic of Henry James’s original novella but something much closer to us — the 1950s, which is to say Britten’s own decade, his own psychological weather. The effect is quietly unsettling before a note has been played.

And Spence earns the unsettlement. His Prologue — “It is a curious story” — is marked quietly in the score, and he honors that marking while finding underneath it something genuinely glazed, as though the man recounting this tale has never quite returned from it. When the text demands he conjure the uncle’s strange prohibition — the Governess must never contact him, no matter what — Spence’s eyes go somewhere else entirely, and you catch a first glimpse of the unearthliness he’ll carry into his incarnation as Quint. Same voice, different soul. Britten and Myfanwy Piper understood that ambiguity was structural, not decorative.

The production’s design anchors the drama in glass — windows, a door, the suggestion of transparency that is never quite transparent. Beyond all of it, the spread of a dead tree’s branches. It’s not subtle, but it works, because Kent doesn’t lean on it. The two revolving stages do the work of scene transitions with a mechanical efficiency that mirrors Britten’s own orchestral variations — those sixteen interlocking pivots that carry the drama between scenes, screwing tighter with each repetition of the generating twelve-note theme.

Miah Persson’s Governess arrives by train rather than horse-carriage — another deliberate modernizing touch — and you believe her immediately. That’s harder than it sounds. The Governess is a role that can tip into hysteria or willed naïveté, and either failure is fatal. Persson keeps her open, genuinely hopeful, a young woman who has taken a job she doesn’t entirely understand yet. The descending melisma she sings on “Why did I come?” lands with particular weight once you notice — and the production gives you every chance to notice — that this same melodic fragment will return in Quint’s mouth, coaxing Miles. Britten plants his musical evidence early.

Susan Bickley’s Mrs. Grose gives the production its moral gravity. She’s not comic relief, not a foil — she’s the only fully adult consciousness on stage, and Bickley plays that with an almost frightening steadiness. The warmth she brings to the Scene 2 reunion with the Governess is real, and the solo violin that accompanies it is one of Britten’s most quietly devastating strokes of orchestration. One instrument, saying everything.

Hrůša’s conducting is the kind that reveals itself slowly. He doesn’t announce his interpretive choices; he simply makes them, and after a while you realize the temperature has shifted. His ear for the chamber textures — Britten scored this for thirteen players, which in the right hands sounds like a full orchestra and in the wrong hands sounds thin — is exceptionally fine. Nothing here sounds thin. The Decca release of 1954 with Pears and Vyvyan conducted by the composer himself remains the ancestral document, and Colin Davis’s later recording has its devoted admirers. But Hrůša belongs in that conversation.

The video direction by François Roussillon deserves particular mention, because it understands that this is an intimate opera — written for the English Opera Group, conceived for small halls — and the Blu-ray medium is, in a strange way, its natural home. The camera finds what a theater seat cannot: the exact moment Miles bows to the Governess, the exact moment she strokes his cheek, the music carrying that gesture without a trace of exploitation. Britten was always working at that edge — between tenderness and danger, between protection and possession — and a production that flinches from it lies about the work.

This one doesn’t flinch. It watches, and it tightens the screw.