The Turn of the Screw

A young woman is given a job as a governess at a country house, Bly, where she will be looking after two orphan children, Flora and Miles. She has been hired by the children’s uncle and guardian, who doesn’t want to be bothered by anything and who makes the young woman swear to absolute secrecy about the goings-on at his estate. Mysterious things do indeed start to happen at the house, including strange behaviour by the children. She also finds something inscrutable about the housekeeper Mrs Grose, who has apparently spent half her life at Bly. Later, the governess believes she sees hazy apparitions of a man and a woman gliding through the rooms of the house, and she identifies them as the spirits of former employees Peter Quint and Miss Jessel. Demonic forces appear to be running rampant and plaguing the characters. At the end, one thing is certain: one of the characters lies dead. Everything else remains unanswered … Benjamin Britten’s mysterious, arresting chamber opera The Turn of the Screw has a fragmented structure that reflects the main character’s own apparently fragmentary and possibly distorted perceptions and memories. Each scene casts a different light on the events, which are viewed through the lens of the governess’s memories. They do not coalesce into a unified whole, but instead feel more like a puzzle with missing pieces. Britten’s opera is based on an 1898 novel by Henry James that was influenced by early ideas of depth psychology. James once described the novel, with some understatement, as a "play of strange encounters".