‘Who can turn skies back and begin again?” That’s the question the fisherman Peter Grimes asks the universe at the close of his brief aria in Act 1 of Britten’s opera – two and a half minutes of singular, breath-holding music, at the end of which the people around him all think he’s mad or drunk, but we the audience know he’s a man apart, who sees more clearly than any of them.
For someone who runs his life by watching those skies, the words are as succinct as they are beautiful – and there’s a simplicity to the way Allan Clayton sings them that encapsulates the balance of directness and poetry in his Grimes, a role in which he currently has few rivals. Perhaps it also sums up Deborah Warner’s staging, updated to a present-day, left-behind English coastal town, which has an almost workaday realism that feels like an invitation to take everything literally, and yet has touches of the fantastical right from the start. In the prologue, Grimes lies centre-stage reliving in his sleep the nightmare of his court appearance while a fishing boat, suspended from the flies, hangs like the sword of Damocles over his head; in the orchestral interlude that follows this scene, an aerialist tumbles slowly down to be caught by Grimes, again and again.
