Jonathan Kent’s staging is meticulously revived here by Francesca Gilpin with designs by Paul Brown and limpid, elegant lighting by Mark Henderson and David Manion. It is one of the most exquisite, jewel-box things you could ever hope to see on stage, despite being, to us, virtually frisson-free. Set in the time of the opera’s composition, it will look familiar to anyone who enjoys the novels of Richard Yates, and you have to admire the technical facility of such features as the elegant rising and falling wall of windows / lake, the countryside hurtling past as the Governess rides to her doom, and the mesmerising revolve. However, it is so bound up with delighting the eye that there is little sense of the sheer horror which James’ story and Britten’s music so chillingly evokes.
The Governess is presented very much as the epitome of one who is, as James put it, “a young woman privately bred” and in Natalya Romaniw’s performance it is her passion for rectitude which shines out, although at times the projection is on the strident side. Anthony Gregory’s Quint is depicted as being about as scary as an insurance salesman, but he compensated for that with some eerily atmospheric singing, the imprecations to Miles almost raising a shudder. Mrs Grose is in the ever-reliable hands of Anne Mason, and Miranda Keys, who had impressed with her Duenna in the Festival’s Rosenkavalier, was a strongly characterized Miss Jessel, portraying vividly what James saw as her “grand melancholy of indifference and detachment.”
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