REVIEW: Peter Grimes, Opera North, Theatre Royal
A very welcome return
The story told in Peter Grimes is so, so sad – but it’s a rueful sadness (this is how life can be) rather than a tear-jerking, sentimental type of sorrow.
More often than not, the stage is crowded, Opera North’s Chorus playing its full part and with a troupe of children often busying the scene.
And yet this is a story of a man set apart, emphasised by a haunting score perfectly evoking the lonely nature of his existence and of the coastal landscape and vast sea beyond.
Grimes, a fisherman, is an outsider in a tight-knit coastal village (in Suffolk, as imagined by composer and creator Benjamin Britten) and a man conflicted.
He doesn’t shun society but is shunned by it. He vows to marry widowed schoolteacher Ellen Orford, who sticks by him when others won’t, but compromise isn’t in his nature.
To crew his ship, Grimes relies on an ‘apprentice’ from the workhouse. We encounter him first at the inquest into the death of one such young boy, alone at sea with Grimes.
An accidental death is recorded by lawyer Swallow (James Creswell) but village gossips assume the worst. Ugly rumours persist, Grimes is ostracised.
Even the loyalty of Ellen and old sea salt Captain Balstrode (terrific performances by Philippa Boyle and Simon Bailey) is sorely tested.
You feel for the guy but then another boy dies and gossip turns to outright hostility. A biddy called Mrs Sedley (Hartlepool-born Claire Pascoe), amateur sleuth, claims to have evidence of murder and an armed mob assembles with drum and flaming torches. A Grimes effigy is dismembered.
Britten’s famous opera was premiered in London in 1945, a success from the outset. (Noteworthy fact: in that first performance, operatic bass Owen Brannigan, born and buried in Annitsford, North Tyneside, sang the part of Swallow.)
This production, directed originally by Phyllida Lloyd, is an Opera North favourite. It was here in 2006 and again in 2013, with Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts in the demanding title role.
Freshened up by revival directors Karolina Sofulak and Tim Claydon, it has been touring again (although the solitary Newcastle performance was the last) with the magnificent John Findon as Grimes.
The British tenor cuts a powerful figure on stage, well able, in one of the saddest scenes, to hold the body of the boy aloft (full marks to young Toby Dray for a nerveless performance) while singing in the sweetest voice.
You can imagine his Grimes as the big kid who got bullied at school until lashing out when he could take it no longer and getting punished.
The actual first sight we have of him here is of his body washed up on the shore, a pitiful sight on the gunmetal grey set.
How things came to this sorry pass is revealed over three absorbing acts, replete with characters and multiple sights and sounds that will replay vividly in your head.
Among them are those ‘ear-worm’ orchestral interludes, so much meaning in every portentous note, the terrific spectacle of the storm – singers all front of stage – and the emblematic fishermen’s net in which all sway silently as the music dies and the light fades away.
Doubtless Opera North will revive its Peter Grimes again one day. Don’t miss it.