Peter Grimes

The ENO have now joined the Met, Glyndebourne and ROH in providing live screenings of opera, and thus we were able to see the revival of David Alden's production of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes with far better visibility and comfort than would have been enjoyed by most of the Coliseum audience. As is conventional these days, the production replaced Britten's Suffolk fishing village with a concept of its own: a Weimar aesthetic was employed to depict the community as a ferocious, semi-crazed mass, complete with a besuited Auntie, bug-eyed 'nieces' that had stepped out of a horror movie and apothecary Ned Keene as a writhing alcoholic loon. Parts seemed close to what an original might have been like: Act 2, Scene 1, set outside the church, was brilliantly effective in moving through its sequence of solos, ensembles and closing chorus, and one sensed the mighty ocean beyond. But the strange staging of the Moot Hall dance, depicting a cross-dressing community in a hedonistic frenzy, just seemed at odds with the libretto and score, and I found I had to 'see through' it to get what was going on (just a village dance, albeit with some predatory elements). Elsewhere, the use of boat motifs and angled planes of wood and corrugated iron effectively evoked the way the nautical world had colonised the mentality of coastal life. The presence of the sea is a constant in the music, even if the set quite often kept it out.

Whatever the visual interpretation, I found the work as a whole tremendously powerful. To my ears, the musical execution was first-rate, with the ENO Chorus providing a tremendous sound (and here the expressionist hand movement choreography, which reminded me of  Pina, helped to bring out the volatile emotions at work). Elza van der Heever (Ellen Orford) has a gorgeously lustrous voice, and Stuart Skelton in the title role was deeply affecting as actor and singer. The last Britten opera I saw was Billy Budd, and this work seems to chart similar psychological territory: the tension between the differently oriented individual and the ordered community, the demons that rise from the deep, the dangerous lure of innocence, sexual attraction, official power, individual quest for fulfilment, all drawn into a tragic arc leading to persecution and sacrifice. Shortly after his centenary, Britten is still delivering a powerful and strikingly contemporary message.