Conductor Ben Glassberg
Direction Deborah Warner
Set design Justin Nardella
Costumes Luca Costigliolo
Lighting Jean Kalman
Mimic movements Joanna O’Keeffe
Orchestra of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma
With Ian Bostridge as Quint

New staging of the Rome Opera House
Italian and English surtitles by Prescott Studio

Rome, Teatro Costanzi
19, 23, 25, 27, 28 September 2025

*

Lost souls in a labyrinth of desire
by Edward Seckerson
Warner’s first production of «The Turn of the Screw»
London, Barbican Centre, 1997 – Excerpt

[…] The kiss which Peter Quint tenderly plants on the forehead of the dying boy Miles in the closing moments of Deborah Warner’s new production of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw will of course be misconstrued by those who insist upon trawling through the composer’s private life in search of contemporary answers to this opera’s many questions. To others, it will come as a benediction, a fond but chaste farewell to innocence, to youth, to life and love misspent. Warner has a lot – a whole lot – to answer for. Which is precisely why her production is so intriguing. And compelling. And provocative by virtue of not being provocative. Ambiguous without striving to be. Scary because it’s ambiguous. Like Henry James. Warner doesn’t run from the uncomfortable questions that this story poses, nor does she underline or seek to answer them. She torments us with them. And that is scary.
So what are those questions, and why do they unsettle us? What exactly was the relationship between Quint and the previous governess, Miss Jessel? How exactly did Quint «make free» with Miles? Were Quint and Jessel simply the unacceptable face of permissiveness and promiscuity, robbing their young charges of their innocence, awakening in them the first stirrings of puberty? Could be. Such things were not spoken about, let alone flaunted, in the England of James’s novella. […]
It’s the “could-bes” of this staging that make it so intriguing. The world we enter, a dead, dread space […], appears like some sort of halfway house between this world and the next. The tall, thin, louche figure [of Quint], who silently makes his way through the darkness, from a door upstage to the incongruous grand piano downstage, belongs here. Indeed, it is as if the real “visitors” to this story are the living, not the dead, come to confront their fears, their prejudices, their desires. So the “ghosts” move freely, casually, through this environment, shadowing, “parenting” the children (whose own sense of reality is unhindered) while their protectors look on. Quint is no longer just a shadowy figure, but in the room with the Governess, vindictively knocking over a vase of flowers in order to make his presence, his displeasure, felt. He helps even make up Miles’s bed […]. And he is sung – wonderfully and with immaculate diction – by Ian Bostridge, who succeeds in making Britten’s aching melismas (free and adventurous as Quint is wont to be) at once beautiful and subversive (all those near quartertones). Physically, he is an adornment, draping himself around the production.