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) of Dockery and Johnston. Dowling also picked out the performances of Lindsay and Sayer as worthy of note, while Whitelaw praised MacLiam, who was able "to personify pure evil with scarcely a line of dialogue". Segal, by contrast, felt MacLiam was badly cast, which resulted in "one of the story's primary dark forces [looking] more like a member of Elbow than the very essence of evil". James's novella "The Turn of the Screw" has been much analysed in academic literature, and, given that it has been frequently reinterpreted in the arts, discussion of many of the adaptations has found a