The Turn of the Screw review – gripping and unsettling water-logged staging of Britten’s ghost story

Natalie Abrahami and Michael Levine’s imaginative production is brilliantly creepy and insightful. A first-rate cast of adults and children do not put a foot wrong

Are you sitting comfortably? Britten’s opera The Turn of the Screw begins with the tenor as storyteller, giving us the facts – something that will be in short supply later in this evasive ghost story. In the Royal Opera’s new production, this happens in absolute blackout. All the better to focus our attention on the words, you might think – but then, slowly, you realise that the singer is moving around in the darkness, impossible to pin down. Something is wrong. That’s one unsettling effect even before the lights have gone up – and there are many more in this insightful, brilliantly creepy staging by the director Natalie Abrahami and designer Michael Levine.

The set gives us the suggestion of a traditional country house: doors, beds, the Governess’s haunted desk. Duncan McLean’s videos appear on an otherwise invisible screen in front, often showing us faces from hidden viewpoints: the children gazing out of the window, excited to see their new governess arrive, but also secretly looking for someone else; Flora as she lies on her front on the jetty, dangling her doll in the lake and dipping her own face into the water.

Abrahami and Levine are not the first to latch on to the WB Yeats quotation – “the ceremony of innocence is drowned” – used by Myfanwy Piper in her libretto, but it’s striking how large a part water comes to play. It’s underneath the house all the time, emerging only as the floor is broken up into smaller platforms. These are wheeled around by the ghosts themselves and by their two silent doppelgangers, whose presence also enables several skilful misdirections of our attention, as well as underlining the Governess’s desperation: how can she compete with beings who can be everywhere all the time?

The water has its disadvantages – a ghost who sploshes is less sinister than one who moves silently. But those noises can’t compete with the richly woven performance the conductor Bassem Akiki draws from the 13 players in the pit and from his first-rate cast. There’s an intense Governess from the rising soprano Isabelle Peters; a warm Mrs Grose from Claire Barnett-Jones; a persuasive, potentially volatile Peter Quint from Elgan Llŷr Thomas; and a luxuriant Miss Jessel from Kate Royal, returning to the stage after several years away.

As for the children, they were played on opening night with extraordinary detail and presence by Phoenix Matthews as an old-soul Miles and 11-year-old Emilia Blossom Ostroumoff as defiant Flora – a role often given to an adult singer playing young. Only when Akiki and the production team paddle on stage, barefoot, to take their bows alongside the cast does the tension finally loosen its grip.

• At Linbury theatre, London, until 6 April