Britten's 'The Turn Of The Screw' exploits all the uncertainty of the original story, with disturbing results, writes Arminta Wallace
Children aren't what they used to be. Or at least our confidence in what is normal in adult-child relationships has been so shaken over the past decade that it has become increasingly difficult to make assumptions about elements of those relationships that we used to take for granted. The ceremony of innocence appears to be not merely dead, as Yeats suggested, but with O'Leary in the grave, which makes Benjamin Britten's extraordinary examination of the subject, in his chamber opera The Turn Of The Screw, more relevant - and more disturbing - than ever.
The opera, which is about to tour Ireland, is based on a novella by Henry James, first published in 1898 and quickly acclaimed as a masterpiece of psychological analysis and a superbly crafted piece of storytelling. The Turn Of The Screw is in many ways a child of its time. With its country-house setting and firmly fixed class hierarchy, it can be read as a straightforward tale of the supernatural in the tradition of Walter de la Mare.
Yet it is anything but straightforward. In its treatment of childhood innocence - and possible corruption - the piece anticipates Freud's discoveries about infantile sexuality. James described it as an "irresponsible little fiction" and a "trap for the unwary"; one critic points out that it "moves in a miasma of uncertainty".
Britten imported all that uncertainty into his opera - and then some. The action opens with a young governess having accepted a position looking after two children, Miles and Flora, on a large country estate. At first all seems idyllic, apart from the fact that Miles has been sent home from school for an unnamed misdemeanour. Gradually, however, the governess becomes convinced that Miles and Flora are being corrupted by the ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessel, former valet and governess at the house. Quint, she is told, "made free" with everyone, including Miles - and Miss Jessel, who, it is hinted, became pregnant by him. She vows to save the children, but it all ends badly: as the opera comes to a close Miles dies in her arms.
At its première, in 1954, The Turn Of The Screw was received as a simple confrontation between good and evil, with the governess cast as the good, Quint and Miss Jessel as the evil and the children as pawns on the chessboard. (An early film of the novella starring an angelic-looking Deborah Kerr, entitled The Innocents, took a similarly innocent position.) Then along came the critic Edmund Wilson with a Freudian reading that declared the ghosts to be a product of the governess's feverish imagination. As a frustrated Anglo-Saxon spinster, so this theory goes, she is hell-bent on winning the love of the children in order, ultimately, to win the love of their guardian.
As awareness of the extent to which the sexual abuse of children had permeated so-called civilised society, it became increasingly fashionable to present the opera as a case of sexual exploitation centred on Quint's supposed abuse of Miles. As the interpretative pendulum has swung to and fro, productions of The Turn Of The Screw have featured everything from all-but-explicit sexual acts to endings in which the governess holds a pillow over Miles's head - or wakes up to find the whole thing was just a bad dream. Then, just as the last drop of controversy seemed to have been wrung from the opera, a professor of English at Oxford called Valentine Cunningham provoked one of the more spectacular cat fights in recent Britten scholarship, as the Britten scholar Paul Kildea puts it in his programme note on Opera Theatre Company's production, which opens its tour of Ireland in Kilkenny on Friday.
In one of the first act's most celebrated scenes, Miles recites to the governess a list of Latin nouns that, according to Cunningham, actually consists of "a schoolboy list of impressively phallic items". The litany of slang terms for male genitalia was, he insisted, brought to Britten's attention some time in the 1930s. Cunningham and his supporters seized on this as evidence of a gay subtext in the opera: a nod and wink from the homosexual composer to a circle of friends who, though unable to come out of the closet in the buttoned-up 1950s, knew very well what was intended. Opponents retorted that children don't have to be gay, or abused, to enjoy shocking adults with bad language.
Where does all this leave a director preparing to stage a new production? Opera Theatre Company's staging is a co-production with English Touring Opera - and both Adrian Osmond, who directed the ETO production that toured the UK last autumn, and Helen Eastman, who is directing the new OTC cast in Dublin, say they have relished the chance to engage with an endlessly absorbing piece of theatre.
"One of the remarkable things about both the opera and the original story is what is buried underneath," says Osmond. "Embedded within the words and within the music but never made explicit. I think that's why we keep coming back to this piece and why it retains so much power." Eastman adds: "You can answer too many questions in a production of this opera. In his introduction to the novella James writes that it's about giving a very general sense of evil to the reader so they can construct the details in their own imagination - which makes it quite an important dialogue with a reader's innocence and experience. When Britten takes it on he also takes on that ambiguous relationship with the audience. There's a film version where Miles is raped in a cornfield in the first five minutes, as the credits are going up, which is entirely missing the point."
Such an explicit treatment, Eastman argues, emphasises one level of meaning at the expense of others. And although it has considerable shock value, it ultimately does the opera a disservice. "It is very difficult to define in any individual case what is appropriate or inappropriate behaviour. We don't need Britten to tell us that paedophilia is wrong, so if the opera is about an overtly physical relationship between an adult and a child, you can very simply say that's wrong. But if it's about unhealthy psychological relationships, where the adult is tremendously needy, as the governess clearly is, then that is actually a very complex - and theatrically much more interesting - situation."
She points to the scene in the second act in which Quint and the governess compete for Miles's attention as he sits on the edge of his bed, half-undressed. "To a certain extent it's the adult community which is worried about the impropriety of that and not the child," she says. "In an ideal production the audience should be sitting there wondering, 'Am I supposed to find this dodgy or is it completely innocent?' " Shades of Michael Jackson insisting on the innocence of sleepovers at his house? "Exactly. Either there's no issue there or there's a big problem. The important thing is that we're trying to work out which it is."
In this version of the opera Quint will be neither an evil rapist nor a camp spirit. "Quint was clearly a very important male presence in Miles's life, and the stuff they did together was not the stuff of classrooms and parlours. It was outdoor stuff - pirates and adventure and exploration - a sense of the world outside this very confined, conventional, female-dominated household. I think the wrong thing to do is try to answer the questions like: 'Is Quint abusing Miles?' The only answer is, we don't know."
And nor are we, despite our politically correct postmodern perspective, as blameless in our relationships with children as we might like to think. One of the most discussed lines in the opera is Miles's dying cry of "Peter Quint - you devil!"
For Osmond it is a moment of stunning contemporary resonance that should shake us up more than ever. "For me the heart of this piece is abandonment and loss. You've got these children whose parents are dead and whose guardian has forsaken them. Even their surrogate parents, Quint and Miss Jessel, have gone. So the final scene of the piece becomes a tug of war between Quint and the governess - the father figure and the mother figure. It's literally like a custody battle, where a child is asked: 'Do you want to live with mummy or with daddy?' And it's too much for the child to take."
Like all great works of art, Britten's The Turn Of The Screw can sustain a multitude - perhaps an infinitude - of interpretations. But while the arguments over its dramatic implications continue to rage, everyone agrees that, musically, the piece is a gem. Composed as an elaborately formal theme and variations, it boasts gorgeous instrumentation, evocative musical interludes and a brilliantly inventive use of children's songs - and none of the scenes lasts for much more than four minutes.
"It's a cracking introduction to opera," says Osmond. "That's what they found on the UK tour of this production, anyhow: that people were coming who had never been to an opera before and were so thrilled by this that they want to keep coming back."
The Turn Of The Screw opens at the Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny, on Friday, then tours to Mullingar, Ennis, Bray, Dublin, Belfast, Letterkenny and Dundalk
