Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, a major turning point in Britten’s career and English opera, is revived with great success. David Alden’s stark and brutal 2009 production, conducted by Martyn Brabbins and designed by Ian Rutherford, is an excellent showcase for ENO and not to be missed.
The opera which premiered at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in 1945, three weeks after World War II ended, was inspired by George Crabbe’s poem, The Borough, but Britten’s Grimes is not Crabbe’s sadistic villain.
He is not the brutal paedophile the village community imagine him to be and hold him responsible for the deaths of two child apprentices and want him convicted of murder. The deaths were accidents.
Grimes is a fisherman trying to make a living and escape a wretched life of poverty. He dreams of money and marriage and is denied both. In his final scene, on a bare stage with a lot of sky, Gwyn Hughes Jones is what Grimes has always been: a tortured outcast, a victim of society’s prejudices. Britten, a homosexual and a conscientious objector, would have had no difficulty identifying with him.
There are fine performances by Elizabeth Llewellyn as the widowed schoolteacher who loves Grimes and by Simon Bailey as the retired naval officer who advises him what he should do next.
The most prominent role, however, is the chorus representing the hostile villagers. Vocally and physically, they excite, filling, crowding and dominating the stage. The cruel community and the cruel sea become one and the same thing. Choreographed by Maxine Braham, the chorus ebbs and flows, swells and surges, rages and storms. The vocal power is absolutely overwhelming.
Britten’s score – and the interludes, which portray the sea in its different moods – is superb. Peter Grimes is a thrilling musical experience and, I repeat, not to be missed.
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