The Royal Opera’s new Peter Grimes is a co-production with Madrid’s Teatro Real, where it was first seen, and hugely admired, last year. Conducted by Mark Elder, directed by Deborah Warner, and superbly cast, with Allan Clayton tremendous in the title role, it’s an angry, confrontative, rightly unsettling interpretation of Britten’s first great examination of the relationship between the outsider and society.
Warner hauls the opera into the here and now, reimagining The Borough as a decayed, isolated coastal town in post-Brexit Britain, a place of boarded-up shop fronts and desperate poverty where hatred, blame and prejudice fester amid the deprivation, and where a loner such as Clayton’s Grimes almost inevitably becomes the victim of a community looking for a scapegoat. Warner’s approach is by no means naturalistic, though: the Prologue is staged as an expressionist dream as Grimes sleeps on the shore and an aerialist (Jamie Higgins) hovers overhead as thoughts of his first apprentice’s horrific death begin to erode Grimes’s mind.
