Ratcheting Up the Tension in 'The Turn of the Screw'

Despite their many dissimilarities, don’t be fooled into thinking The Turn of the Screw must have less impact — the tension and suspense it generates in performance is just as devastating as that of its larger predecessor.

“It may be a chamber opera,” stage director Louisa Muller says, “but I don’t think it feels small in any way. Because there are only six people on stage, you get drawn into their story.

“And the way Britten has orchestrated it has massive impact. When the full forces of the 13 players come together, it’s incredibly powerful.”

Muller’s new-to-Santa-Fe production of The Turn of the Screw is an adaptation of one of her biggest successes.

It originally appeared in Garsington Opera’s 2019 season, with The Guardian describing it as “a beautiful, unsettling piece of theatre that sifts through the work’s ambiguities with a subtlety that in itself has something of the complex finesse of James’s prose … A truly great achievement, devastating and unforgettable.”

When Garsington revived it in 2022, Opera’s Peter Reed called it “bursting with the sort of connective, proliferating detail that hooks the audience into the story … Of the many productions I’ve seen of this work, for subtlety and layers of meaning, Muller’s is in a league of its own.”

Asked about how she and her designers — Christopher Oram (scenery and costumes) and Malcolm Rippeth (lighting) — developed their approach to the piece, Muller says, “We started from the idea that the piece is perfect already. It’s perfectly crafted, the pacing of it, the structure of it, and the libretto is so strong.

“We set about to make the most perfect production of this perfect piece we could imagine, and not to lay something different on top of it.”

Preserving the ambiguity that pervades Henry James’ novella on which the opera is based was another key goal for Muller and her team.

“I think what has made it so intriguing for generations of readers is that there’s so much left unsaid,” Muller points out. “What’s not there is what makes it so effective. I didn’t want to tell the audience what they should be thinking about what’s going on in the opera.”

For Muller, Oram, and Rippeth, part of the challenge with this new production of The Turn of the Screw was adapting it to work just as well here, in a venue and a setting that are very different from Garsington’s.

The English festival’s productions are given in a very modernistic building, on the grounds of a traditional country estate, and it has glass walls on both sides of the stage and the audience. À la the Glyndebourne Opera, performances start in the late afternoon and there’s always a dinner break between two of the acts.

“When we originally designed it, we didn’t think it would travel anywhere else, so we conceived of it as a site-specific piece,” Muller says. “And it’s been a really exciting challenge to say, ‘OK, what’s the site-specific version of this set that takes advantage of everything that the Santa Fe Opera has that we didn’t have before, and doesn’t worry too much about the things we had before that we don’t here?’”

Oram revised the footprint of the set so it would work better in Santa Fe — the original would have been too large to look right — and narrowed its upstage width to fit the curvature of our stage.

The bigger set of changes involved the lighting design.

“The directionality of the light here is very different, and what we’ll be able to do with light is very different,” Muller says, “because at Garsington, we were essentially in daylight for the entirety of Act One, and the light came in very strongly from stage left, across the stage, because that’s where the sun is setting during Act One.

“Malcolm Rippeth, the lighting designer, now suddenly has a lot more tools at his disposal. What we don’t have is God’s lighting, which we had at Garsington, but we’ll be able to control it much, much more here than we could there.”

Fluid dynamics don’t often come into play when discussing opera scenic design, but they do for The Turn of the Screw, with water playing an increasingly large role in this production as the action progresses.

At a basic level, it’s a literal part of the opera, with multiple scenes taking place along the side of a lake. It’s quite modest in scope during Act I, which Muller describes as “a wide-open space, with no furniture, so the cast is very free to move through it in ways that feel natural.”

In Act II, water takes up much more of the stage space. “First of all, it’s about the way the world of the ghosts is taking over the world of the humans,” says the director. “Miss Jessel is very much tied to the lake. I always think of her as ‘The Lady of the Lake,’ so she’s always coming from the water and going back to the water.”

The expanding lake also represents the changes in the governess’ mental state. The house at Bly starts out being an incredibly welcoming place to her, but as the action progresses it becomes a claustrophobic place where she feels trapped.

“When the water encroaches and we add furniture, suddenly the navigation in the space becomes incredibly proscribed,” Muller says. “So even though the set overall is the same, the way the characters can move through it is totally transformed.”

Muller’s leadership partner in the production is the New Zealand-born violinist-turned-conductor Gemma New, who makes her Santa Fe debut with The Turn of the Screw.

She has an impressive track record as an orchestral conductor, including four years as principal guest conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, four years with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra as its resident conductor, and four years (and counting) as principal conductor of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

New is (you should pardon the phrase) relatively new to the professional opera field. Her highest-profile credit to date is an acclaimed Susannah with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2023. Opera Today’s James Sohre said of it: “Anticipation was high, and she did not disappoint, eliciting an impassioned, richly detailed reading.”

Her interest in opera actually started early on. “We had a wonderful company in Christchurch [New Zealand], where I was studying as a teenager,” New says, “and I was the assistant conductor for Il Trovatore and The Magic Flute.”

After earning a master’s degree at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, her orchestral career took off so quickly that most of her subsequent opera conducting has been in concert programs, rather than on the stage.

Asked to describe her thoughts when she first started working on The Turn of the Screw, New says, “It’s such fantastically beautiful music. That’s what got me first,” as she places her hands over her heart. “Britten’s music is like Suffolk [the region on England’s eastern coast where he grew up]. It can seem a little bit reserved at first, but under the surface, it’s deeply emotional.”

Another aspect that immediately impressed New is the importance of the orchestra in the actual storytelling — it doesn’t just accompany the singers. “Britten says, ‘They are the story,’ so they obviously turn the screw, and they create the scene and the atmosphere, and they are a character as much as the singers on the stage,” she says.

And the conductor is just as enthusiastic about the cast as she is about the opera.

“Brenton Ryan is a rather perfect Peter Quint,” she says. “He plays it as this slightly puckish character. I like that, because if you are pure evil, then our audience won’t care what happens to you.

“With the sympathetic notion that he is entertaining and alluring in a way, you can see why other people have been attracted to him,” New continues. “Plus, he’s got such a stunning voice. It’s so beautiful and has such a perfect warmth and clarity, which is so important for the prologue.”

Jacquelyn Stucker, who plays the Governess, has the largest role and is onstage for almost all of the opera. “One of the things I love about Jacquelyn is that she’s always asking questions and exploring different possibilities to look at things,” New says, “which means her role will be so authentic for our audiences. Plus vocally, she’s a star.”

When it comes to the young performers Everett Baumgarten and Annie Blitz, who play the children Miles and Flora, New says, “I’ve been blown away by them, and so is our director, Louisa, because they have everything on point.”

“I’m an auntie,” New confesses, “so I love my little kids. I think for our audience, seeing children on stage perform so brilliantly, it’s got to get your heartstrings. The opera is all about innocence and corruption, and the innocence of these children makes it so much more of a tragedy.”