Review: PETER GRIMES, Royal Ballet And Opera
Deborah Warner's production returns to the Royal Opera House
Peter Grimes hinges on the duality between its chorus and Grimes as an individual. In one corner the spectacle of the mob, bustling and boiling with rage in their witch hunt for Grimes, and in the other corner is lonely fisherman Grimes himself, whose mental breakdown demands gutturally intimacy. Can Deborah Warner’s 2022 production, revived at the Royal Opera House, rediscover that equilibrium that electrified its first outing?
The answer is a resounding yes. Warner lays Grimes's psychological torment bare with unflinching clarity. The opening court scene is rendered as a nightmare, the chorus swirls around Grimes haunting him like a ghostly shoal of demonic fish. Above it all, his drowned apprentice, reimaged by an aerialist, hangs suspended from the rafters, swaying gently as a spectre dancing at the edge of Grimes's vision. Conductor Jakub Hrůša finds the same balance in Britten's Interludes, drawing out moments of aching, lyrical beauty before allowing the music to darken and swell into something altogether more foreboding. The ocean as solace and as threat, sometimes within the same breath.
Peter Grimes is a lonely fishman who is turned on by his village after the accidental death of his young appprentice. Allan Clayton’s performance bleeds visceral melancholy, his voice at once razor-sharp and emotionally raw, always anchored in his character's fractured psychology. What makes it truly remarkable is how Clayton holds the darkness and the light. Beneath Grimes's paranoia and guilt, a flicker of hope for salvation still burns in his feelings for Ellen Orford, a widowed teacher. “I’ll marry Ellen” he repeats to himself, each time becoming more distorted as the hope fleets away.
Sir Bryn Terfel's Balstrode is a different kind of power altogether. His voice carries the deep, enveloping warmth, a steadying presence amid the storm that engulfs the Suffolk coastal town, as reassuring to the audience as he is to Grimes himself.
Grime’s village are a character in their own right, coursing through the production it with restless, collective energy. From the grimy local pub to the salt-worn docks, economic decay looms every surface culminating white hot rage in the third act when they hunt for Grimes. Peter Mumford's lighting bathes the entire world of the production in a sickly, jaundiced yellow. The village’s degradation is as much spiritual as it is material.
Peter Grimes plays at the Royal Opera House until 28 May
Photo credits: Tristam Kenton
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