It’s hardly the first time a director has tried to tack another layer onto Benjamin Britten’s chiller about ghostly possession in an isolated old country house in the 1840s. Henry James’s teasing story already suggests (among much besides) that the governess sent to look after two children in this rather marvellously contrived location is prone to vivid imaginings. Isabella Bywater, director of ENO’s new show (playing until October 31st) opens the show with her on a mental ward 30 years after the events – looks like the ’50s, so the main action is presumably updated to the 1920s – reliving them in her memory, past and present mingled and conversing in excellently layered ways as the poor woman lies and paces and frets in the gloomy, empty ward. 

Children’s games and songs come with a queasy undercurrent of spiritual sickness

Or maybe she’s dreaming the whole thing. Was she nuts all along, or traumatised out of her wits by the events? We aren’t told: it’s one of the enigmas that drive along this story that plays on our childish fears and love of being frightened in cosy surroundings. James’s own “turn of the screw” was to involve children – and not one, but two – with the hint that they have in hazy but thrillingly sordid ways been depraved by two servants, who with ultimate piquancy have now returned as ghosts to continue their devilish work. Add to this Britten’s thing about boys, his fixation on innocence corrupted, and current child-abuse frenzy, and you have a fruity stew indeed. Lucky that the people who wrote it were so puritanically precise: imagine how hysterical it could have all got in less punctilious hands. 

And the music is as layered as the text. Foreboding breaks into a birdsong idyll. Evil enters in the sugarplum clothing of the celesta and the Arabian Nights melismas of Peter Quint. Children’s games and songs come with a queasy undercurrent of spiritual sickness. A jaunty recitation of Latin nouns turns into a cor anglais-haunted lament. The governess and Quint share musical themes. Everything is echoes and hints, silhouettes and shadows. It’s a great piece, though whether it really amounts to anything more than a jeu d’esprit (as in James) is a matter of taste. You sometimes get the worrying idea that Britten meant it to – but maybe that’s another spooky trick.

Bywater is better known as a designer, and the low-lit set, with its embrasured windows and half-darkness where people and things are half glimpsed, is a fine place to get febrile imaginations jumping about. On these blank walls, Jon Driscoll pans and scans black and white films of the battlemented house, the trees and sinister lakes of its park, the tombstones of the churchyard, to terrific effect. 

For a masterclass of what theatrical design can do, and a thoroughly admirable performance, this is good stuff

This all works really well for the first half of the opera – a buildup of atmospheres and possibilities, the children’s behaviour slightly uncanny (funeral rites for a dolly…) without being actually freaky. Peter Quint (Robert Murray) doubles as a hospital porter, and makes a very material ghost. Meanwhile the governess (Ailish Tynan) seizes on the thought of the ghosts and shakes it with obsessive certainty.

In the second half, we find the director hasn’t many cards left to play. The design-led power of the early scenes covers up the fact that those frisson-laden ambiguities have not actually been built up all that well – that to some extent the actual directing of physical nuance has been drowned in the visuals. To milk the thing of all available shivers the audience has to be allowed to worry about everything – including the idea that it’s the children corrupting the innocent governess, as well as the opposite. Here things are almost too straightforward – though we remain unsure, as we must, about the existence of the ghosts. And this despite their having a scene to themselves, where the former governess, Miss Jessel, also appears, a sorrowing wraith, to accuse and entreat the overweening Quint, who we understand had impregnated her before she also died in an unexplained way (you suspect a watery grave). 

It’s very well performed, starting with a really strong and spacious orchestral performance conducted by Duncan Ward, the timbres of Britten’s single-instrument band working wonders to create atmospheres from innocent pastoral to the iciest horror. And there is nothing wrong with the performances: Ailish Tynan is hypnotic as the unravelling Governess, though given the pretty harmless behaviour of the children (somewhat passive in the second cast – apparently the first makes a punchier impression) her feverish thoughts feel largely internal. Eleanor Dennis was properly scary as Jessel, glaciated by sadness. The end somehow misses the futile tragedy of the thing, and you leave just feeling a but sad, which soon passes. But for a masterclass of what theatrical design can do, and a thoroughly admirable performance, this is good stuff.