The “Borough” in which Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes takes place, loosely associated with the composer’s gentrified Aldeburgh, has been relocated sixty miles down the East Anglian coast to Jaywick Sands in Deborah Warner’s powerfully reimagined production. Jaywick is the deprived estuary town that brought the setting into focus for Warner and her designer Michael Levine. It’s a place where decades-long neglect and collapsing local industry have brutalised the community, creating the necessary conditions for the construction of scapegoats such as Grimes. The thuggish resentment of this neo-fascist vigilante mob reaches a chilling climax when an effigy of Grimes is pitchforked and battered to death by torchlight. Peter Mumford’s lighting and Kim Brandstrup’s choreography greatly enhance the dramatic power of this scene. The grisly realism is skillfully balanced by Warner, however, with dreamlike episodes including those incorporating an aerialist (Jack Horner) representing first the ghost of the apprentice and finally the body of Grimes settling on the sea floor.
Much of the cast from the original 2022 production has returned, but the conductor is now Covent Garden’s music director Jakub Hrusa and his contribution is revelatory. The “glitter of sunlight” referenced in Montagu Slater’s idiosyncratic libretto has never been more brilliantly reflected. Britten’s infinitely resourceful scoring positively gleams here: it’s bright, bracing and appropriately salty. But Hrusa is equally alert to the ravishing quality of the intertwining woodwind lines, the dulcet harp, the velvety strings, all superlatively delivered by the Royal Opera orchestra.
Allan Clayton, in the title role, is most effective in depicting the sympathetic, visionary side of the character he plausibly believes to be suffering from a psychotic trauma (following the death of his apprentice), even if the voice lacks the texture and complexity of some of the finest exponents of the role. Bryn Terfel’s Balstrode seems gruffer, less patient, than before, but is excellently sung, as is Maria Bengtsson’s radiant Ellen Orford. James Gilchrist reprises his wonderfully unctuous rector, Horace Adams, and Jacques Imbrailo returns as the shifty quack Ned Keene.
Peter Grimes has been with us for over eighty years now, but has rarely seemed more of our time than in this poleaxing production.
