wed 11/12/2024

The Turn of the Screw, Glyndebourne Festival Opera | reviews, news & interviews

The Turn of the Screw, Glyndebourne Festival Opera

The Turn of the Screw, Glyndebourne Festival Opera

A thrilling, chilling production of Britten's ambiguous ghost story about haunted children

The possessed and the possessors: children Flora and Miles and the ghosts Miss Jessel and Peter QuintAll images © Alastair Muir/Glyndebourne

Glyndebourne’s production of Benjamin Britten’s terrifying The Turn of the Screw is one that really does turn the screw tightly in the mind. It pierces time with its updating from its original Victorian setting to a bleak Fifties Britain, it tightens the tension with its wintry, claustrophic setting, and it delivers its questions into our suspicious, information-saturated modern heads with added twists. Given a magnificent musical and dramatic ensemble to interpret it in this revival, it's an evocative way for Glyndebourne to end this tense, unpredictable summer, art gnawing away at the stable certainties of British classical culture.

Glyndebourne’s production of Benjamin Britten’s terrifying The Turn of the Screw is one that really does turn the screw tightly in the mind. It pierces time with its updating from its original Victorian setting to a bleak Fifties Britain, it tightens the tension with its wintry, claustrophic setting, and it delivers its questions into our suspicious, information-saturated modern heads with added twists. Given a magnificent musical and dramatic ensemble to interpret it in this revival, it's an evocative way for Glyndebourne to end this tense, unpredictable summer, art gnawing away at the stable certainties of British classical culture.

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