The Turn of the Screw (opera) composer conducting. Described as one of the most dramatically appealing English operas, the opera in two acts has a prologue and sixteen scenes, each preceded by a variation on the twelve-note 'Screw' theme. Typically of Britten, the music mixes tonality and dissonance, with Britten's recurrent use of a twelve-tone figure being perhaps a nod to the approach of Arnold Schoenberg. Thematically, the play gives a central role to a line borrowed from W. B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming": "The ceremony of innocence is drowned." The opera was given its British premiere on 6 October 1954 by the Sadler's Wells
The Turn of the Screw (2009 film) Andy Cooper praised the "creepy atmosphere" and tension, but said that the film "[fell] short in the chills department" and "could have done with a few jolts of terror to breathe more life into it". The divergences from the original novella's plot were generally not well received. Tim Teeman, reviewing "The Turn of the Screw" for "The Times", felt the 1920s setting did not contribute to the story, as it was not properly developed. He compared the film to Sarah Waters's novel "The Little Stranger", a ghost story set in the 1920s in which the social upheavals of the decade