T-shirts emblazoned with “Save our WNO” are now default concert uniform for the orchestra of Welsh National Opera, a silent protest in the pit while playing with customary supreme professionalism. When called on stage with their instruments to take a curtain call at the end of WNO’s new Peter Grimes, the applause in Cardiff’s Millennium Centre was deafening. This dress code began last summer, when funding cuts to WNO were announced, referred to several times in this column. At the risk of banging on, I’ll bang on. Industrial action continues, after a re-ballot last month. We have watched a cash-starved English National Opera shrivel. WNO’s position is perilous, with no rescue rope in sight.
Communal solidarity heightened the intensity in Melly Still’s new staging of Grimes, perceptively conducted by the company’s admired music director, Tomáš Hanus. In Chiara Stephenson’s designs (lighting Malcolm Rippeth), the Suffolk coast of composer Benjamin Britten, and of George Crabbe, poet of the original story, has vanished into a generic, semi-urban no man’s land. Emphasis now is on psychology and character. A near empty stage and black backdrop offer simplicity for touring, but also reflect a need for thrift. The wooden boat suspended above the stage, slowly spinning, casting shadows, gives us a taste of the sea, now a frame for a starry sky, now a mandorla to hold the wan figure of Grimes’s dead apprentice, who becomes an almost sacred figure.
