Award-winning new staging of The Turn of the Screw

A young governess arrives at a secluded estate, where she is to take care of the upbringing of the two orphans, Flora and Miles. Here she must fight to protect the children from sinister ghosts. But are these apparitions real, or are they the product of her own shame, guilt and negligence, and what happened in the house before she arrived?

“Wonderful, impressive, but terribly eerie and scary,” Benjamin Britten wrote in his diary after hearing Henry James’ short novel The Turn of the Screw on the radio as a teenager. Britten composed his opera based on the disturbing ghost story with lightning speed in just four months in 1954.

The Turn of the Screw is staged by the young, award-winning British director Anthony Almeida, who together with set and costume designer Rosanna Vize was awarded the European Opera-Directing Prize 2021 for their concept for this particular staging of Britten’s opera. Their focus is on the untold and the tragedies and traumas that we dare not talk about and how they haunt us.

The music in The Turn of the Screw is imbued with an intense sense of claustrophobia and dramatic power. The Royal Danish Opera’s award-winning young soprano, Clara Cecilie Thomsen, performs the role of the governess. The children, Flora and Miles, are embodied by Barbro Citron and Milo Wajnman Køie/Hannibal Skovlund Brockhoff. Also appearing are Gisela Stille, Johanne Bock, Fredrik Bjellsäter, the Royal Danish Orchestra and Resident Conductor of the Royal Danish Opera, Robert Houssart.

The Turn of the Screw is performed in English with Danish supertitles.
In collaboration with Opera Europa/Camerata Nuova.

The Turn of the Screw | New production, Old Stage 17 Sep – 6 Oct 2023
Read more about The Turn of the Screw HERE

Conductor: Robert Houssart
Director: Anthony Almeida
Set and costume designer: Rosanna Vize
Lighting designer: Lucy Carter

Quint and Prologue: Fredrik Bjellsäter
The Governess: Clara Cecilie Thomsen
Miles: Milo Wajnman Køie/Hannibal Skovlund Brockhoff
Flora: Barbro Cítron
Mrs. Grose: Johanne Bock
Miss Jessel: Gisela Stille
The Royal Danish Orchestra