Helen Wallace on Aurora’s haunting weekend on the Snape
marshes
Standing in Snape you can just make out the tower of St
Botolph’s church. It promises a village on the banks of the
River Alde, which Iken once was. But when you snake your
way beside treacherous mud to the churchyard, you find only
a relic of a hamlet and a dead end, stillness, neglect and the
sour, dank smell of the marshes. As dusk gathers, rooks
caw, isolation intensifies. Surely, just such a remote location
is what James imagined for Bly, where orphaned children,
paranoid adults and the spirit of evil collide against a cold,
watery backdrop?
This was the starting point for ‘The path to Bly’ that prefaced
Aurora’s production of Turn of the Screw, curated by
directors Sophie Hunt and Andrew Staples (also singing
Quint). The wide canvas of twilit landscape, with its intriguing
voices, embedded music and eerie shrines, could not have
presented a sharper contrast to the staging: a giant cat’s
cradle caught orchestra and singers in a cage. With the
governess (an incandescent Sophie Bevan) standing in the
centre of this labyrinth, the idea that the story occurs in her
mind was to the fore. William Reynolds’s projections
liquefied, electrified and obliterated the ribboned structure,
allowing it to ‘re-grow’, to become a starry night, strobe-lit
nightmare, or simply her pulsating brain in which characters
were illuminated and snuffed out, inexorably separate.
That separation detracted from key moments: this
governess, frozen on her podium, can never comfort Miles or
face off Miss Jessel, and when the ghosts arrive there’s no
sense of confrontation. Though marvellously sung, by a
seductive Staples and darkly plush Jane Irwin, there was
something jarring about ghosts holding scores; they were too
similar to Ann Murray’s convincing Mrs Grose. Only the
children, hands-free, and could escape the cage to indulge
in some distinctly troubling ritual play.
Vocally Joshua Kenney (Miles) and Louise Moseley (Flora)
were powerfully true, even if, like their elders, their words
were mostly lost into the hall’s gloom, with no surtitles for
back-up.
Nicholas Collon conducted soloists from the Aurora in a
performance of spine-tingling eloquence. They revealed
anew the intricate brilliance of the score, with its insinuating
12-note passacaglia returning with fresh menace and
ravishing colours as the screw turns. Virtuosic strings
produced dizzyingly fast figures and the pizzicato patter that
drives Quint’s questioning had a visceral urgency I’ve not
heard before. Pianist John Reid gave vivid voice to his key
role. There were moments of intense focus: Kenney’s ‘Malo’,
in which he was reduced by lighting to a skeletal sapling, cut
to the quick; the wild energy in Quint’s calling to Miles.
Bevan’s final requiem, distorted by anguish, delivered a
wrenching catharsis.
Britten once wrote of the necessity of ‘a firm secure musical
structure which can safely hold together and make sense of
one’s wildest fantasies.’ Perhaps two secure structures was
a constriction too far?
Strictures were happily abandoned in Spirit House, a family
concert the previous night, in which illusionist Neil Henry and
four vivacious Aurora soloists provided an entrancing intro to
Britten’s music. Imaginative as it was, music from Turn of the
Screw was strangely absent, surely Britten’s spookiest work,
and keystone of this ‘Supernatural in Suffolk’ weekend.
marshes
Standing in Snape you can just make out the tower of St
Botolph’s church. It promises a village on the banks of the
River Alde, which Iken once was. But when you snake your
way beside treacherous mud to the churchyard, you find only
a relic of a hamlet and a dead end, stillness, neglect and the
sour, dank smell of the marshes. As dusk gathers, rooks
caw, isolation intensifies. Surely, just such a remote location
is what James imagined for Bly, where orphaned children,
paranoid adults and the spirit of evil collide against a cold,
watery backdrop?
This was the starting point for ‘The path to Bly’ that prefaced
Aurora’s production of Turn of the Screw, curated by
directors Sophie Hunt and Andrew Staples (also singing
Quint). The wide canvas of twilit landscape, with its intriguing
voices, embedded music and eerie shrines, could not have
presented a sharper contrast to the staging: a giant cat’s
cradle caught orchestra and singers in a cage. With the
governess (an incandescent Sophie Bevan) standing in the
centre of this labyrinth, the idea that the story occurs in her
mind was to the fore. William Reynolds’s projections
liquefied, electrified and obliterated the ribboned structure,
allowing it to ‘re-grow’, to become a starry night, strobe-lit
nightmare, or simply her pulsating brain in which characters
were illuminated and snuffed out, inexorably separate.
That separation detracted from key moments: this
governess, frozen on her podium, can never comfort Miles or
face off Miss Jessel, and when the ghosts arrive there’s no
sense of confrontation. Though marvellously sung, by a
seductive Staples and darkly plush Jane Irwin, there was
something jarring about ghosts holding scores; they were too
similar to Ann Murray’s convincing Mrs Grose. Only the
children, hands-free, and could escape the cage to indulge
in some distinctly troubling ritual play.
Vocally Joshua Kenney (Miles) and Louise Moseley (Flora)
were powerfully true, even if, like their elders, their words
were mostly lost into the hall’s gloom, with no surtitles for
back-up.
Nicholas Collon conducted soloists from the Aurora in a
performance of spine-tingling eloquence. They revealed
anew the intricate brilliance of the score, with its insinuating
12-note passacaglia returning with fresh menace and
ravishing colours as the screw turns. Virtuosic strings
produced dizzyingly fast figures and the pizzicato patter that
drives Quint’s questioning had a visceral urgency I’ve not
heard before. Pianist John Reid gave vivid voice to his key
role. There were moments of intense focus: Kenney’s ‘Malo’,
in which he was reduced by lighting to a skeletal sapling, cut
to the quick; the wild energy in Quint’s calling to Miles.
Bevan’s final requiem, distorted by anguish, delivered a
wrenching catharsis.
Britten once wrote of the necessity of ‘a firm secure musical
structure which can safely hold together and make sense of
one’s wildest fantasies.’ Perhaps two secure structures was
a constriction too far?
Strictures were happily abandoned in Spirit House, a family
concert the previous night, in which illusionist Neil Henry and
four vivacious Aurora soloists provided an entrancing intro to
Britten’s music. Imaginative as it was, music from Turn of the
Screw was strangely absent, surely Britten’s spookiest work,
and keystone of this ‘Supernatural in Suffolk’ weekend.