Chilling show does justice to James’s ghostly tale

It’s hard to imagine a more aptly evocative setting for Britten’s masterly adaptation of Henry James’s ghost story The Turn of the Screw than the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park where dense foliage surrounds the stage and the sunset turns dusky in the gloaming.

Against this, designer Soutra Gilmour presents the haunted country house of Bly as a burnt-out skeleton of a place inside which the orchestra, efficiently conducted by Toby Purser, plays from behind semi-opaque windows. An upright piano has been dumped in a ditch: there’s an electrifying moment when Miles, twiddling through his banal Grade 5 flourishes, is pushed off its stool as the spectral Peter Quint takes over and the music turns slightly jazzed and crazy.

This is one of many fine touches in a production directed by Timothy Sheader that gathers pace and intensity in the second act, charged up by Daniel Alexander Sidhom and Elen Willmer’s exceptional performances as the pubescent Miles and Flora.

Both convey the pair’s eerie complicity, masked by a veneer of mere playfulness, and Sidhom in particular is chillingly convincing in enacting the mixture of rapture and terror that characterises Miles’s unfathomable relationship to Quint.

Sheader also makes good use of the theatre’s spaces for the appearances of the ghosts. The problem lies in Anita Watson’s decently sung Governess, who seems much too conscientious and reasonable a creature to be imagining the blackest moral “horrors”. This is crucial: unless her sanity is in increasing doubt, the drama has no basis.

Elin Pritchard is a heavily pregnant Miss Jessel and Janis Kelly makes a brisk and homely Mrs Grose. But the most vocally striking contribution comes from the promising Welsh tenor Elgan Llyr Thomas, who as Quint combines rich vibrant tone with handsome presence.

William Morgan gives an overemphatic account of the Prologue, that copybook example of Britten’s genius for setting the English language to expressive music: presumably with permission from Britten’s estate, sniggers have been avoided by changing that previously innocent word “gay” to “free”. A bit of a cop-out, it seems to me.