The Turn of the Screw, The Grange, Hampshire

Haunting ground

The perfect setting for Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw would be almost anywhere in and around The Grange: in the corridors, through the crumbling reception rooms, above and below stairs, out on the lawns. Almost anywhere, that is, but not inside the new theatre. It's something of a paradox that the director, David Fielding, and the designer, Andrew Walsh, go to such pains to create an appropriately ghostly atmosphere when the real thing is but a step away from them. Perhaps they missed a trick in not having Peter Quint, the dead valet, and his mistress, Miss Jessel, stroll nonchalantly through the restaurant during dinner.

The unhappy couple make an early, unscheduled appearance in Fielding's staging. The Prologue narrator (Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts) and Quint are written to be doubled, of course, but rarely has the relationship between them been made quite so explicit. The mysterious man with the suitcase is acting suspiciously. A letter unsettles him. The handkerchief he pulls from his pocket is bloodied. Removing his trilby, he dabs at a nasty head wound. We also notice that while the painted frontcloths suggest a country lane, the row of hanging utility lamps hints at a corridor. I guess we are between worlds, between waking and sleeping, life and death. Giant tilted blackboards dominate the main stage area, on them a series of seemingly unrelated words and phrases. One is repeated again and again: "Malo". And there, at the centre of the stage, the house itself – in miniature. The children's plaything.

Fielding and Walsh do well in creating this emblematic environment, and Chris Davey lights it eerily. A hidden door in one of the blackboards suggests the entrance to the spirit world. So far, so creepy. But I am puzzled by the updated period. Why the 1940s? Or is it early Fifties, the time of the opera's composition? The essence of Henry James's ghost story lies in the corseted moral values of the Victorian age. The torrid affair between Quint and Jessel – and Fielding hints at its sado-masochistic nature in the nature of the games the children play – would have been seen as deeply, shockingly corrupting. The innocents of the ruling class dragged down to the baseness of the serving class. Update the period and you dilute the issues.

That apart, Britten's extraordinarily heady brew is kept simmering and shivering nicely by a talented cast. Natasha Marsh conveys a barely repressed sensuality as the Governess. Her keening melismas speak of longing, her body language of unfulfilled desire. By contrast, the housekeeper, Mrs Grose, is a constant reminder of what she might easily become – a thin, bespectacled, buttoned-up, black spinster. In that role, Clarissa Meek is a welcome change from the usual cuddly casting. The children, Flora and Miles, are never easy to cast, but I do believe that they must both be children. Tiny Megan Kelly does a good job as Flora, but her maturity is unsettling alongside the puckish William Sheldon. Janis Kelly's vampish Miss Jessel is all innuendo and allure – a kind of sexy severity – and Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts, though he'd do well to calm down a bit on the high anxiety, is a forcefully sung Quint. I'm not sure he was helped by the dryish acoustic of the theatre, but the keen-focused band under Lionel Friend was – once the first oboe had sorted out his reed.

Fielding does have one startling eleventh-hour revelation in store. When Miles finally screams, "Peter Quint, you devil!", the words are not addressed to Quint but rather hurled directly at the Governess. In other words, far from letting Quint go, he's hanging on to him. You see, the devil is in the detail.

6 & 11 July (020-7320 5408)