‘Why did you call me from my schoolroom dreams?” The urgent question is asked by the spectral Miss Jessel (Elin Pritchard) of her likewise deceased lover Peter Quint (Brenden Gunnell) during the pair’s tingle-inducing Act II duet from The Turn of the Screw.

The scene is hugely important in Benjamin Britten’s 1954 chamber opera, signalling his and librettist Myfanwy Piper’s departure — though the Oxfordshire-based writer didn’t see it as such — from Henry James’s original 1898 novella, in which the existence of the ghosts is always uncertain.

Occurring out of view of the Governess (Ellie Laugharne), the confrontation shows the pair not to be the invention of her romantic, possibly fevered, imagination but ‘real’ figures with malevolent intentions, their precise nature unclear, towards her young charge Miles (Dominic Lynch) and his elder sister Flora (Rosie Lomas).

Directing the first, superbly sung, production of the work for OHP, Annilese Miskimmon appears to have let the scene, and specifically the mention of ‘schoolroom dreams’, affect her whole approach. We are shown in designer Leslie Travers’s set not the mist-wreathed lake and turreted tower of stately Bly, so eerily depicted as a rule, but a stage-wide representation of a classroom — not spooky at all.

Her conceit would appear to be of the story seen as the invention of The Prologue (Robin Tritschler) who, following his introduction, continues to wander through the action (an observing shrink perhaps?), together with an equally unexpected parade of Miles’s fellow pupils in blazers and caps.

Britten purists will not like it. No more will they approve Miles’s not dying (squeezed to death?) in the arms of the Governess. What they will like are the glories of the music as supplied under the baton of the noted Britten authority Steuart Bedford. He is at Wormsley next year for Garsington Opera’s Death in Venice. Can’t wait.

The Turn of the Screw
Opera Holland Park
July 3, 5, 9 and 10
Tickets: 0300 999 100 or visit rbkc.gov.uk/operahollandpark