THE TURN OF THE SCREW • STAATSOPER UNTER DEN LINDEN
★★★★☆☆
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
REVIEW THE TURN OF THE SCREW BERLIN: DEMYSTIFIED NIGHTMARE
Where the Royal Opera House let Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw drift into a dark, hallucinatory pool of doubt, paranoia, and unease, Claus Guth’s Berlin production pulls the work into something that bears a striking resemblance to the film The Shining.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
What sets the Berlin production apart is that Guth reveals sexuality as the core of the play early on. The boy has sex with his sister—not presented as a sensation, but with a matter-of-factness that illustrates something already twisted.
It is not the concrete that dominates, but the sense of something illegal, unspoken, and deeply taboo that lies beneath the narrative and poisons all the relationships in a production that downplays the supernatural and instead seeks to interpret the story from within.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
Guth’s staging, originally created in 2014 and now revived at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, is tightly composed and scenically precise. The famous ghosts never truly materialize. Peter Quint and Miss Jessel exist primarily as voices, echoes, and mental imprints.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
Thus, The Turn of the Screw in Berlin becomes more of a psychological chamber play than a Gothic ghost story. The mystique is not gone—but it is more easily demystified.
An effective set design brings the narrative together in a rotating, labyrinthine house interior, where doors, corridors, and rooms are constantly shifting. The references to The Shining are clear.
The house functions as a mental landscape that is slowly revealed and helps bring about the breakdown.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
Compared to Michael Levine’s set design in London—which I just reviewed with top marks here on GOT TO SEE THIS, where the stage literally disappeared beneath water and layers of visual shifts—the Berlin production feels less fantastical, which, quite frankly, makes the absence of a clear plot somewhat unsatisfying.
The performance is largely carried by Christiane Karg as the governess. Her soprano is brilliantly clear, precise, and without exaggeration. She sings not hysteria, but control, in a way that makes her slow descent into madness unsettling. Karg portrays a woman desperately trying to navigate fear, desire, and responsibility—and breaking.
Musically, the evening is consistently strong. The Staatskapelle Berlin, conducted by Finnegan Downie Dear, plays Britten with sharp transparency and a nervous tension that constantly shivers beneath the surface like an internal tension screw.
The ghost story serves as a mask. The dead employees, the voices, the paranoia—subdued signs of a sexualization that has been repressed and transformed into a nightmare.
Where Britten’s opera in its basic form—and especially in the London production—insists that we can never quite determine what is real and what is actually happening, Claus Guth seems to point more directly toward an explanation, though I cannot yet say I have fully unraveled the mystery.
The Turn of the Screw in Berlin is a powerful, musically compelling, psycho-sexual production that earns four stars from GOT TO SEE THIS
