OPERA / Wrong spirit: The Turn of the Screw - Glasgow Tramway

It ought to be possible, using all the forces of opera, to chill our hearts to their very core. Yet Britten's The Turn of the Screw is never really chilling; all the spectral music, coupled with every device of lighting, set and make-up, cannot take away its impression of sophisticated contrivance or the feeling that this is a musical setting of an eerie story, rather than an eerie story in its own right.

Scottish Opera's decision to do the piece in the round at the Tramway, rather than behind the proscenium at the Theatre Royal, might have neutralised some of the work's merely reflective or literary qualities. But no, it still evoked admiration rather than ghoulishness. The polish, taste and intelligence of David Leveaux's version heightened the feeling of being at two or three removes from James's scary tale.

Maybe Leveaux's very avoidance of the obvious, and his eye for thematic connections and details, are exactly what the opera does not need. Why not try a straightforward Grand Guignol approach, with green lights, whitened faces and trapdoors? It would at least shock the critics.

This production pays the price of its success. Its intellectual refinement is sensitively matched by Timothy Lole's conducting and the sharpness of his chamber ensemble; Britten's many-layered counterpoint came across with the utmost transparency. With the band placed at one side of the acting area, synchronisation was tricky in the quick numbers but every word of Myfanwy Piper's rather self-conscious text was clearly audible.

The designs, by Vicki Mortimer, were simple and unchallenging. Apart from a real lake and a semi-abstract house facade, the Tramway's staircases and gantries, designed for servicing Glasgow's trams, served as wall and tower, and the Victorian ambience was suggested by bric-a-brac - a bicycle, a square piano.

The cast was first-class. It is true that Anne Williams-King's romantic looks and warm voice seemed a bit sensuous for the part of the Governess, but she overcame this with her vivid, nervous, big-scale acting, crouching in horror and raising her lip in a near-scream, especially in the closing scenes of looming hysteria. As Mrs Grose, Menai Davies was vocally powerful and dramatic.

The two ghosts, Philip Salmon as a fluent and lyric Peter Quint and Louisa Kennedy-Richardson as a resolute Miss Jessel, were far too true to Britten's sculptural lines and florid invocations to seem at all ghostly. The children were splendid, Colin McLean as a stiff, paralysed Miles and Paula Bishop as an unlovable, slightly sluttish Flora.

But perhaps, after all, the Tramway, with its magnificent lighting-board, would be just the place to get some real shock and terror into this piece. There was something elegant, reverential about this production that added little to our feelings about the opera.

To 26 Feb, Glasgow Tramway (booking: 041-227 5511)