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Evil Gets All The Best Seats
Marc Sidwell watches 'Turn of the Screw' at the
Coliseum with a bunch of middle-class perverts
Friday, December 14, 2007
There’s nothing like a ghost story around Christmas time.
Mind you, Henry James’s The Turn of The Screw, even in
Benjamin Britten’s operatic adaptation, is not much like a ghost story.
The supernatural elements are allusive and arguably pure psychological
projection; the horror is never spelt out. A little boy gets kicked out of
school, wanders around at night, then dies for no clear reason. So why
did I leave the Coliseum feeling that my spine had been packed in ice?
Basically, because no one in that massive auditorium needed to have it
explained to them what was going on. For all their expensive dresses
and watches that can go down to 40,000 fathoms, these nice
respectable people all got every drop of wicked insinuation with ease. It
may be the best argument I’ve ever seen for the doctrine of original sin.
Consider this programme note, which deals with the reading most
people manage to attach to the bland letter of expulsion from Miles’s
headmaster [it just says that he is “a danger to his fellow-students”].
“[Sex is] there, lurking in the thickets of most readers’ imaginations,
when the question is raised as to why Miles was expelled from school.
Had it been something as commonplace and boring as stealing a fellow
pupil’s pocket money or breaking into the tuck shop, it would surely
have been paraded in the headmaster’s moral rectitude. So, was Miles,
with his almost sublime good looks, the house tart?”
It is not a charming thought that the people one mixes with over an
interval gin and tonic are enjoying themselves because they can pick up
the stench of a child’s sexual corruption from the merest hint. All these
charming, cultured men and women, all with the nose of the child
catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
That is scarcely the least of it. Michael Winner once directed a film
prequel to Turn of the Screw, recording the perverted liaisons that
James and Britten never actually describe between Peter Quint and Miss
Jessel. Despite starring Marlon Brando, The Nightcomers was a flop.
Why? Because it told people what they already knew. And what did
they know?
“… a tawdry account of bondage, sadism, degradation and incest.”
It is a simple but satisfying trick as a writer to force the reader to
betray their own dirty mind by providing a suggestion that they can
only access by imaginative interpretation.
There was a young girl from Belize
Who said to her lover, “Oh, please!
It will help with my bliss
If you do more with this,
And pay less attention to these”.
In Britten’s opera, the comic trick has become bleak literary device. All
foulness is implied: he creates a profound entertainment we can only
enjoy by admitting our own complicity. And how we do. The ENO’s
current staging is the talk of the town. Contemplating this, the town
can only look at its expensive shoes and mutter along with Miles, “You
see, I am bad, aren’t I?”. Classicists may unpick the sung Latin verses
and hear “O arsehole, scrotum, penis, bless ye the Lord”, but they
aren’t telling anyone anything they didn’t already know.
So as I left Turn of the Screw chilled to the bone, I tried not to meet
the gaze of my companion. We each knew that about ourselves of
course. But to find such depravity in a close friend...
Marc Sidwell watches 'Turn of the Screw' at the
Coliseum with a bunch of middle-class perverts
Friday, December 14, 2007
There’s nothing like a ghost story around Christmas time.
Mind you, Henry James’s The Turn of The Screw, even in
Benjamin Britten’s operatic adaptation, is not much like a ghost story.
The supernatural elements are allusive and arguably pure psychological
projection; the horror is never spelt out. A little boy gets kicked out of
school, wanders around at night, then dies for no clear reason. So why
did I leave the Coliseum feeling that my spine had been packed in ice?
Basically, because no one in that massive auditorium needed to have it
explained to them what was going on. For all their expensive dresses
and watches that can go down to 40,000 fathoms, these nice
respectable people all got every drop of wicked insinuation with ease. It
may be the best argument I’ve ever seen for the doctrine of original sin.
Consider this programme note, which deals with the reading most
people manage to attach to the bland letter of expulsion from Miles’s
headmaster [it just says that he is “a danger to his fellow-students”].
“[Sex is] there, lurking in the thickets of most readers’ imaginations,
when the question is raised as to why Miles was expelled from school.
Had it been something as commonplace and boring as stealing a fellow
pupil’s pocket money or breaking into the tuck shop, it would surely
have been paraded in the headmaster’s moral rectitude. So, was Miles,
with his almost sublime good looks, the house tart?”
It is not a charming thought that the people one mixes with over an
interval gin and tonic are enjoying themselves because they can pick up
the stench of a child’s sexual corruption from the merest hint. All these
charming, cultured men and women, all with the nose of the child
catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
That is scarcely the least of it. Michael Winner once directed a film
prequel to Turn of the Screw, recording the perverted liaisons that
James and Britten never actually describe between Peter Quint and Miss
Jessel. Despite starring Marlon Brando, The Nightcomers was a flop.
Why? Because it told people what they already knew. And what did
they know?
“… a tawdry account of bondage, sadism, degradation and incest.”
It is a simple but satisfying trick as a writer to force the reader to
betray their own dirty mind by providing a suggestion that they can
only access by imaginative interpretation.
There was a young girl from Belize
Who said to her lover, “Oh, please!
It will help with my bliss
If you do more with this,
And pay less attention to these”.
In Britten’s opera, the comic trick has become bleak literary device. All
foulness is implied: he creates a profound entertainment we can only
enjoy by admitting our own complicity. And how we do. The ENO’s
current staging is the talk of the town. Contemplating this, the town
can only look at its expensive shoes and mutter along with Miles, “You
see, I am bad, aren’t I?”. Classicists may unpick the sung Latin verses
and hear “O arsehole, scrotum, penis, bless ye the Lord”, but they
aren’t telling anyone anything they didn’t already know.
So as I left Turn of the Screw chilled to the bone, I tried not to meet
the gaze of my companion. We each knew that about ourselves of
course. But to find such depravity in a close friend...
| Marc Sidwell is not joking |
© lizardmagazine.com, 2007
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