United Kingdom Britten, The Flip of the Screw: Soloists, Orchestra of the English Nationwide Opera / Duncan Ward (conductor). London Coliseum, 16.10.2024. (MB)
Manufacturing:
Director, Designs – Isabella Bywater
Lighting – Paul Anderson
Projections – Jon Driscoll
Solid:
Governess – Ailish Tynan
Flora – Victoria Nekhaenko
Mrs Grose – Gweneth Ann Rand
Miles – Jerry Louth
Miss Jessel – Eleanor Dennis
Peter Quint – Robert Murray
Prologue – Alan Oke
It had been some time since I final noticed The Flip of the Screw, although there was a time when it appeared fairly a daily. To my thoughts the strongest of Britten’s operas, it was final seen on the London Coliseum in a superb staging by David McVicar: once more to my thoughts, one among his strongest. It now returns in a brand new English Nationwide Opera manufacturing by Isabella Bywater, additionally designed by her, with a powerful solid performed by Duncan Ward.
Bywater’s manufacturing appears typically to have been effectively acquired. While acknowledging her effort to carry a brand new standpoint to the work, I’m not satisfied it succeeds; no less than, it didn’t succeed so effectively for me because it apparently has for a lot of. The drama is introduced within the Governess’s flashbacks from a psychiatric hospital, occasions at Bly presumably no less than having contributed to her committal. Scenic projections onto the hospital set lead us again to the home and its grounds: to my eyes, slightly clumsily. This was clearly a traumatic, horrific expertise for the Governess, all of the extra in order introduced in a finely noticed, deeply compassionate efficiency from Ailish Tynan. There may be splendidly creepy – and chillingly significant – youngsters’s play, as an illustration with Flora and her doll.
The issue – and I’m not certain this was Bywater’s intention – is that in giving the impression that the occasions might straightforwardly have been imagined by the Governess, the drama veers in a one-sided route that has one in the end query what the purpose of it could be. Asking ‘did the Governess see the ghosts’ is after all an inexpensive and certainly crucial query; continuing as Bywater does in her programme observe and likewise, so it appears, onstage, to ask ‘Did she have a persona dysfunction?’ dangers lacking the purpose. ‘Ambiguity is what makes it unsettling,’ Bywater provides. Exactly, which is why it appears an odd transfer to rid it of most of that ambiguity; extra disturbingly, it comes near turning the Governess’s misery right into a spectacle and eclipsing the ‘actual’ query of what has been finished to the kids. Having the Governess think about a lot appears each implausible and undesirable. It’s completely attainable, after all, to undertake a partial standpoint; many stagings of all method of works do, with larger and lesser success. The Flip of the Screw, nonetheless, emerges considerably shortchanged — while on the identical time, to be honest, removed from fruitlessly interrogated.
Ailish Tynan’s efficiency was completely central to these fruits, each detailed and skilfully sketching the broader image. Eleanor Dennis’s Miss Jessel and Robert Murray’s Peter Quint have been equally detailed portrayals, extremely commendable, although the underlying premise maybe labored all of the extra in opposition to them. Gweneth Ann Rand’s Mrs Grose, by flip heat and distanced, was permitted to supply larger ambiguity. Victoria Nekhaenko’s Flora and Jerry Louth’s Miles have been each glorious too, strolling dramatic tightropes with nice ability and credibility, the latter’s icy supply specifically each bringing residence and into query the theme of innocence’s loss in work and staging. Alan Oke’s Prologue as medical marketing consultant provided a masterclass in diction and framing, surtitles the truth is proving pointless all through.
Ward’s musical interpretation appeared to have been formulated with Bywater’s idea in thoughts. Particularly within the first act, a looser, extra rhapsodic strategy, suggestive of psychological dysfunction and even a shift from ghost story into outright horror, was prevalent. What I missed was a stronger sense of line, of the workings of scenic and longer-term development, so essential to this opera’s dramaturgy. Maybe by design, this fell into clearer focus after the interval, suggesting a battle between freedom and determinism removed from irrelevant to the musical in addition to stage motion. Moments of horror registered in vividly pictorial vogue, at occasions presaging the desiccated late world of Loss of life in Venice; their integration on this, maybe Britten’s most constructivist rating, was much less clear.
In the end, then, Bywater’s manufacturing didn’t for me cohere in addition to McVicar’s extra easy but deeply dedicated manufacturing or Anneliese McKimmon’s considerate, extra correctly ambiguous staging for Opera Holland Park in 2014 (assessment right here). Likewise, the conducting of Charles Mackerras and Steuart Bedford on these events did extra to allow and elucidate Britten’s turning of the musical screw. I used to be grateful nonetheless for the chance to have skilled it, not least for Tynan’s gripping Governess.
Mark Berry
