Maybe it is the harsh chiaroscuro of grit and beauty. Maybe it’s the unflinching display of community at its worst – of isolation in closeup. Either way, Britten’s Peter Grimes is an opera that gets under your skin. Its characters can haunt and its strange, stark soundworld can linger long after curtain-down.
To state the obvious, Grimes is never a cosy night at the opera. But David Alden’s award-winning 2009 production for English National Opera – back on stage for the first time since 2014 – makes for especially grim viewing. We’re in the mid-century: no Ercol in sight, just bare corrugated iron and drab Sunday best, where violence is barely concealed behind stiff upper lips. In Alden’s Borough, virtually everyone seems traumatised. Grimes has his mad scene, but is anyone really sane in a world where women wiping-down tables do so in slow motion with fixed, empty stares? Or where a folk song precipitates a zombie-like mass dance routine?
