Venue: Opera North
Director: Alessandro Talevi
Set and Costume Design: Madeleine Boyd
Photography: Bill Cooper
Interval time in @OperaNorth – Turn of the Screw stream. Creepy, insidious, almost Freudian production, with very expressionist lighting (think Murnau’s Nosferatu or Coppola’s Dracula). Great performances from Sarah Tynan as the Governess and Tim Gasoriek, astonishing as Miles T.
Interval time in @OperaNorth – Turn of the Screw Twitter Stream, Tim Ashley, 2020
To paraphrase a cliché, it’s rare to leave a theatre humming the lighting. But here, Matthew Haskins’ lighting designs help make this production so powerful and evocative, whether projecting grotesque, distorted shadows on the back wall of Madeleine Boyd’s claustrophobic set, or illuminating characters’ subtle facial expressions. Dawn and dusk are both beautifully realised, and when we’re finally shown a brightly lit stage at the opera’s shocking close, you almost have to shield your eyes.
Graham Riskon, The Arts Desk
Matthew Haskins’ precise and dramatic lighting finds all the dark corners of Madeleine Boyd’s stylishly skewed set.
Ron Simpson, Whats On Stage
The atmosphere of claustrophobia and psychological terror is brilliantly maintained, aided by Matthew Haskins’subtle lighting changes from the brightness of an idyllic uppercrust country life to a menacing atmosphere of half-light and shadows.
Geoffrey Mogridge, Opera Brittania
It’s a world of half lights and shadows (thanks to Matthew Haskins’s atmospheric lighting effects) and tacit implications which, under Alessandro Talevi’s insightful direction, invite even more disturbing interpretations.
David Truslove, Opera Today
