by Michael Mitchell

The Turn of the Screw

by Benjamin Britten

Based on the Henry James novella

Like most discerning fans of the macabre out there, if you’re a well-versed one, you’ve most likely come across Henry James’s seminal novella “The Turn of the Screw.” You may have also come across the Barbara Kerr movie adaptation called “The Innocents,” and also possibly perchance maybe crossed paths with the stageplay, written by William Archibald (who also wrote the screenplay), that preceded the movie. Hey, you may have even seen the 1990ish BBC television adaptation starring Colin Firth. But what you may not have come across in your darkest of dark travels is an opera adaptation of James’s twisted tale of maligned youth written by Benjamin Britten.

Yes, you read that right. I am talking about an opera.

So let’s face facts right off the bat, if you think opera is silly, this one is probably not going to win you over to the art form. It just won’t. As well, writing about an opera for a horror website, no matter how “hard horror” it may be (which this is not), might, at first thought, seem like a bit of a daft idea, as it’s not likely most people reading this will be able to stroll down to the local opera house and catch the weekly Friday Midnight performance. Well, fortunately, there happen to be a few DVD titles on the market that can be procured by those who really really really want to check it out.

Like with a lot of other classics–Frankenstein, Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll &Mr. Hyde come to mind–I don’t think any adaptation has done absolute justice to James’s original as of yet. One will get some parts right, and another will get other parts right. But none seem to have been anywhere near definitive yet. I don’t know why. After all, the source material is there. . . . In any case, I do believe the Britten opera comes the closest to capturing and reproducing the eeriness and atmosphere and menace of James’s tale. But, to be honest, as romantic as I’d like to be about it, I don’t think James’s tale works all that well for the modern reader, either. What with the lengthy prologue and the interminable sentences and the billion semi-colons. . . . And I just don’t know if it’s easy to shake people with spooks and ambience that easily anymore. We’re just too aware and literate when it comes to that kind of stuff now. “The Sixth Sense” seems to have got it right. “The Orphanage” tried, but didn’t quite get there. “The Others” gave it a valiant effort, but I don’t think it was able to fully pull it off. (Interestingly however, “The Others” is actually a loose adaptation of “The Turn of the Screw.”) And I never felt that “what you don’t see is scarier than what you do see” is anywhere remotely true, and even more so true now.

But on stage, watching a spook walk slowly up to a young child from behind, to feel the desire and hunger emanating from a live actor playing a ghoul—well, that takes it to another level.

And the opera does offer up some truly wicked images.

Exactly like the novella, Britten’s opera deals with the nefarious influence the spirits of two dead servants, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, exact on two young children, Miles and Flora, while under the care of their unnamed Governess. [Like in James’s version, the prologue is almost superfluous. Arguments will be made that James and Britten need the prologue to outline the unreliability of the governess, but the story exists well enough without that facet. Official Literary Scholars (my capitals) may disagree, but disagreeing is pretty much all literary scholars are good for anyway.] And exactly like the novella, Britten touches on all of the same issues as James. Yet it wasn’t any easier for Britten to tackle subjects like child abuse, incest, paedophilia, nymphomania and especially homosexuality in 1954 than it had been for James in 1897.

Despite opera’s long history of a seemingly infinite amount of fantastical and grimy productions that dealt with all manner of myths and demons and phantoms and hauntings and tormented psyches (more about those in a future column!), Britten’s opera—entirely owing to the aforementioned thematic content—opened to decidedly mixed reviews. Although there were something like 43 curtain calls at the opening.

As complex musically as it is thematically, Britten’s opera opens on a twelve-note “Screw” theme which is then inverted and permuted and variegated and turned throughout the entire work. (The perversions and reversals of the natural world/order go on and on within the opera, with just one of the more forceful examples being the male Peter Quint singing in a high and attractive voice while the female Miss Jessel uses a low and atonal and almost masculine drawl. There is nothing feminine about Miss Jessel’s singing, especially when she is trying to lure little Flora into the cold, dark lake.) What Britten does sonically is somewhat abnormal, and purposely so. The musical concentration adds to the claustrophobia inherent in the tale itself, which can become even more unnerving when you find out that Britten had included a lot of the eerier sounds without consciously doing so.

It appears as though he was as enchanted with Miles and Flora as their Governess was.

The otherworldliness of the work is further emphasized in a Latin section that also cunningly serves as a tricky play on words to even further, pun intended, drive one of Britten’s themes home. What on the surface appears to merely be Miles and Flora reciting an exercise in grammatical rules:

“O, amnis, axis, caulis, collis,

clunis, crinis, fascis, follis:

Bless ye the Lord.”

turns out to translate directly (or sometimes in Latin slang) as:

“O, asshole, penis, scrotum, penis,

anus, penis, faggot, scrotum:

Bless ye the Lord.”

But the impishness within the dark doesn’t stop there, for even the traditional nursery rhymes that are inserted (again, pun intended) in the work fall prey to sexual overtones. In one, the verse “Lavender’s Blue, diddee, diddee” conveniently becomes the suggestive “Lavender’s Blue, diddle, diddle.”

A remarkable and deep work written in the span of just four months, The Turn of the Screw allowed Britten to explore, express and open up for public discussion many basic human issues western society disallowed him to experience otherwise. As a Christian and a lifelong in-the-closet gay man, he was able to publicly question not only his religion, but bourgeois morals, the nature of influence and ultimate right and wrong without having to pay for his curiosity with his liberty. But what’s most remarkable, in my mind, is that Britten managed faithfully recreate the relationships between the characters. I believe I feel the Governess’s connection to Miles as much in the opera as I do in the novella. That, my friends, is not the smallest of feats.

So what about those DVDs? Well, while not the scariest of the adaptations, perhaps the most interesting one is the Opus Arte BBC television version, which is pretty much a film set to the opera. It’s sort of like an extended Fever Ray video and has some fairly arresting images. It might even work very well with the sound turned down and something like Pantera playing over it. It’s greatest virtue is that, at certain times, the camera puts us in the position of the leering, desiring phantom watching over the innocent children. It makes us question if we are all like the covetous ghosts at times? Hugh Hefner made a bit of money believing we were. And having some of the scenes shot in raw digital adds to the verisimilitude of what you’re seeing. Some great images in that one.

The 1990 Schewetzinger Festspiele stage version has some really gnarly moments itself. One happens when Quint says to Miles late at night alone in the back court: “I am the life that stirs when the candle is out.” Another is when Miss Jessel calls Flora from behind the scrim, it’s pretty freaking unsettling. Seriously. Or at the very end, when the ghost says “We have failed”, and the Governess says “You have won” at the same time. And like Quint says to Miles: “What goes on in your dreams? Stay silent. I know that, too.” It’s an almost intolerably intense experience to see a grown man look a kid in the eye and say those words right in front of you (if your in the audience, that is). There’s no filter like you have in a movie theater or in your living room to see it through.

Like I wrote earlier, if you think opera is silly, there is no way this take on James’s masterpiece will ever get under your skin. But, one day, if you’re casting around in your dotage looking for a bit of a different take on things terror-oriented, you might want to try one of the DVDs. Or better yet, if an opera company is performing the work (it does get staged extremely regularly) go on out and see it. Watching Quint and Miss Jessel skulk around on stage live in front of you is worth all the weird opera singing. Or, hey, maybe you can just bring along an ipod and crank some Pantera while you’re there?

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For some added tangential enjoyment, take a second and savour this twist on “The Turn of the Screw” (who woulda thunk it?):