Another cracking take on the opera film: Marquee TV’s Turn of the Screw reviewed

I’m still waiting for the Royal Opera to step up. Nearly a year into the Covid crisis and what do they have to show for it? One stonking concert staging of Ariodante, a couple of gala-ish performances and some operatic scraps. Where’s the creativity? Where’s digital ingenuity, the willingness to experiment, reinvent, adapt? Where, frankly, is opera?

When companies with a far greater reliance on box office than the heavily subsidised Royal Opera can do their bit — look at Grange Park’s tireless stream of content, ENO and Scottish Opera’s various car-park Bohèmes, English Touring Opera’s monodramas and song cycles, Glyndebourne’s Offenbach-in-the-garden — it’s hard not to feel frustrated. We can acknowledge that it’s easier for smaller companies to pivot and think on their feet without absolving our national opera company of all creative responsibility.

Elsewhere necessity has generated some rich invention, perhaps most unexpectedly in the return of the opera film.