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Stuart Skelton as Peter Grimes |
Noble hero lost in our time
REVIEW: PETER GRIMES
London Coliseum
A NEW Peter Grimes fit the 21st century may well turn into another runaway success for the English National Opera.
Ultimately though, the new spin by director David Alden so alters the balance of the 1945 opera that the noble heroism of Grimes intended by Britten is lost.
In the opera, based in an East Anglian fishing village in the early 19th century, Grimes becomes an outcast, tormented by the community after losing an apprentice boy at sea.
After losing another in an accident, his hopes of making enough money to marry widow Ellen Orford and become a respectable burgher are dashed. Without hope, Grimes takes his boat out to die in the sea.
Traditionally, Grimes has been viewed as an opera concerned with the individual standing out against the crowd as seen from the viewpoint of Britten and his partner Peter Pears, both pacifists and homosexuals.
Today, to be a pacifist or gay is no longer regarded as socially unacceptable, so the new spin places greater emphasis on Grimes battling with sea storms than standing out against the village community with its variety of oddballs – a cross-dressing landlady, her lesbian nieces and a grotesque lawyer among them.
The large chorus is more than just a village crowd. It becomes the raging sea, surging forward and backward across the stage, forming eddies, at times encircling Grimes.
And, just to prove the opera’s 21st-century climate change credentials, there’s much emphasis on the land erosion caused by the stormy sea.
The choral singing on the first night was stunning as was the orchestral playing, both superbly conducted by Edward Gardner. Stuart Skelton came out with his best for Grimes, richly endowing his solos, and Amanda Roocroft was simply outstanding as Ellen Orford.
But the portrayal of Grimes as a manic fisherman makes nonsense of the final scenes when he is shown as a cowering wreck of a man before shuffling out to die at sea.
In this portrayal, Grimes is no longer Britten’s proud fisherman to the end, able to to choose between death in the sea he respects or life in the community he loathes. Is that a mistake? Or are we too losing our ability to make rational choices in today’s society?
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