TURN OF THE SCREW The Herald Sun VO RISES TO THE CHALLENGE

By Sybil Nolan

Here’s yet another example of the cheekiness of the Victorian Opera, a small state company stealing a march on its big sister, Opera Australia.

The OA’s production of Turn of The Screw directed by Neil Armfield, has been described as one of the most powerful pieces in the national company’s repertoire.

But because this chamber opera by Benjamin Britten requires only six singers and 13 musicians to stage, it was inevitable that the VO would eventually take it on.

The result is a success-phew! Thank to director Kate Cherry and conductor Paul Kildea, an authority on Britten’s music who has previously conducted the work for the OA.

In their hands, every member of the talented young cast turns in an authentic, accomplished performance, dramatically and vocally.

Though novelist Henry James wrote The Turn of The Screw while Queen Victoria was still on the throne, its premise seems uncannily contemporary: the ghost of a sexual predator returns to a lonely house in the English countryside to haunt a vulnerable boy. The ghost (James Egglestone, in top voice) first appears encased in a black box with a screen over it, like a curio in a Victorian collection of preserved fauna. He’s a frightful sight with his red hair and dead white face.

Yet as the boy, Miles and his sister fall under the ghost’s power, the effect is to disturb rather than scare us.

Year seven student Takshin Fernando and VCA student Gerogina Darvidis give remarkably artful performances as the children. Danielle Calder is just as convincing as their governess, all stretched nerves and strained gesture.

She also proves a capable interpreter of Britten’s beautiful but challenging scoreas if she has an indelible map inside her head showing the safest route between the mournful woodwinds, worried violin and clashing cymbals.