It has taken more than 50 years for The Turn of the Screw to reach Glyndebourne, a theatre whose scale and intimacy suit Benjamin Britten's chamber operas. Yet Jonathan Kent's production, first seen on last autumn's Glyndebourne tour, does not seal a perfect reunion. Kent's updating of Henry James's late-Victorian ghost story to the postwar England in which the opera was composed is very effective, underlining that Britten, not James, is the evening's presiding spook. Edward Gardner's assured conducting of the London Philharmonic is another musical achievement for this fast-rising British star. But the visual and technical cleverness of Paul Brown's fast-changing stage settings undercuts the original Jamesian claustrophobia.
The truth is that the repressed tensions of the work as it was performed in the 1950s can never now be recaptured. The worm in the bud of this opera is apparent from start to finish. The Turn of the Screw drew from Britten the most taut and brilliant stage score he ever wrote. Yet by making the ghosts who haunt the two children not just real but actively seductive, Britten inserted a massive sexual charge into James's insidious mystery, one which is impossible for a 21st-century director and audience to ignore.
Kent's production is at times explicitly sexual in ways that earlier stagings never were. His ghosts are far more enraptured than tortured. Both William Burden as Peter Quint and Emma Bell as Miss Jessel sing ravishingly. The children are active and aware protagonists. Christopher Sladdin is as knowing a Miles as I have ever seen. Both he and Joanna Songi as Flora sing with unerring and even unnerving assurance.
The dramatic casualty in all this is the Governess. She was already diminished by Britten and Kent's production relegates her further. Camilla Tilling sings the role with lovely tone, but in this production the Governess has become a well-meaning innocent who doesn't get what is going on. We, the audience, no longer have that option.
· In rep until August 25. Box office: 01273 813813.
