Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, with its dark, moody, and evocative score is the most unnerving of operas. Set in a psychiatric ward, and told in flashback, a young governess becomes terrorised by unseen forces inside a remote country house.
While the setting looks Bronte-esque, the menace is 100% pure Hitchcock, and nothing is quite as it seems in this haunting opera at the London Coliseum as an inexperienced young governess takes employment in a bleak country house, home to two orphaned children, both are deeply troubled, maybe possessed.
Her anxiety begins to mount. There are strangled cries during the night, a face at the window, a figure on the tower. Are these simply figments of her imagination, or malign, menacing presences that threaten the charges in her care? She can’t know for sure – and neither can we – as the tension builds up and hurtles towards a nerve-shredding climax.