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Ailish Tynan and Gweneth Ann Rand in ENO’s The Turn of the Screw | © Manuel Harlan

What turns the screw tightest on Henry James’ ghost story? Is it the knowing, or the not-knowing? James himself was clear. He wanted his readers to 'think the evil'; his job was just to nudge the door ajar, to set the candle flickering, drop the breadcrumbs. But some directors disagree, with potent results. Isabella Bywater’s new production for English National Opera falls squarely into that camp. She shows us everything, makes a choice, and still manages to maintain the creeping, pernicious horror of Britten’s opera. 

Bywater skips to the back page in a Prologue turned case-history. We’re in the 1950s. A psychiatrist (hauntingly sung by Alan Oke) reads the 'curious story' from his notes, while their subject herself, the nameless Governess (Ailish Tynan), sleeps fretfully in the ward beyond. Confined to the medical facility, she projects her memories onto the space and the people around her.  

With the help of Jon Driscoll’s evocative video design, those memories coalesce into a Bly of dreams – tree-lined drives and broad stone staircases, woodland and lake – all ingeniously conjured within a shallow set of sliding walls, full of windows, doors and mirrors, ripe for glimpsing, revealing, concealing. I do wonder, though, how much is lost or actively obscured as you move back in the auditorium. 

Bywater has an eye for a tableau. A night-light casts its shadow-monsters onto bedroom walls; Flora and Miles (Victoria Nekhaenko and Jerry Louth) play solemnly at funeral rites; Peter Quint (Robert Murray) rears suddenly up over the battlements. Set against Britten’s crooked little melodies, the slow-ratcheting inevitability of theme-and-variations score as it winds itself to breaking point, these moments would be enough for a satisfying evening. 

Victoria Nekhaenko, Gweneth Ann Rand and Jerry Louth in ENO’s The Turn of the Screw | © Manuel Harlan

Add Tynan’s Governess, and you have something more. There’s a single-minded intensity, an absolute conviction bordering on zeal to her crusade. No longer innocent in this memory-play, this Governess sings – disquietingly – as though she might be. And it’s often the beauty of Tynan’s delivery (impeccably musical, carving out every syllable of Myfanwy Piper’s libretto) that disturbs most. Against the cipher of Gweneth Ann Rand’s Mrs Grose and two children playing an absolutely straight bat (no sinister loading of the dice here) you find yourself uncomfortably swayed by her, even as orderlies usher her firmly back to bed. 

Robert Murray’s Quint has a physicality both in his sound and presence, assaulting Eleanor Dennis’s Miss Jessel roughly on her desk (no equivocation here), turning Britten’s wriggling coloratura into triumphant vocal fanfares. But there’s little charge between him and either Dennis or Louth, who sings ravishingly, numbing what should be the pinch-point of the drama.  

Conductor Duncan Ward does well to balance his forces, careful not to overpower the young singers, but Britten’s taut-thread of a score lacks momentum and its pellucid chamber textures feel muddy as they emerge from the pit in this large space, lacking that dramatic precision that turns a celesta into a shiver down the spine, a drum-rattle into a jump-start. 

Bywater and her team have created a handsome psychological drama. Is it a ghost story? I’m not so sure, but that ambiguity leaves the door just far enough ajar for James and his horrors to creep inside. 

Until 31 October. eno.org