Phyllida Lloyd’s legendary 2006 staging of Britten’s dark masterpiece Peter Grimes has been brought back once again by Opera North, with Karolina Sofulak and Tim Claydon as revival directors and many of the young cast making a company debut. It is once again a triumph. The composer knew very well, like the best dramatists of Ancient Greece, that for deep emotional engagement a principal character should not be completely bad, because that would be too straightforward. There are plenty of out-and-out villains in opera, but Peter Grimes is not one of them. ‘Enigma’ must be the commonest word employed in the many commentaries on him over the years following the opera’s first appearance in 1945. It is rivalled by the word ‘outsider’, because Grimes is shunned by the prejudiced and hypocritical townsfolk of The Borough, the shunning being just one of several major tugs at the audience’s sympathies.
Tenor John Findon was a most convincing Grimes, who made a significant impact even when he was not singing. In Act 3, for example, he held the dead body of his apprentice John (Toby Dray) in his arms alone at the rear of the stage while the orchestra delivered the Moonlight interlude thrillingly. He became almost regal in Act 1 in his immensely pure and powerful rendition of “Now the Great Bear and the Pleiades” aria in the louche atmosphere of the pub, his voice conveying his feelings of hope and love towards his would-be spouse Ellen Orford as well as displaying strong evidence of his violent temper. Soprano Philippa Boyle was Ellen, the woman with the doomed self-imposed task of sorting him out. She was clear and precise throughout, and dealt faultlessly with some vocally tricky interactions with Grimes. Her Embroidery aria, sung movingly with harp accompaniment when she and Captain Balstrode discover the clothing she made for the apprentice washed up on the shore, was an absolute gem. As the pragmatic Balstrode, bass-baritone Simon Bailey gave a sense of effortless authority as well as compassion.
Contralto Hilary Summers was Auntie, the strong-minded landlady of The Boar, as a touch posh, less so the two ‘nieces’ (Nazan Fikret and Ava Dodd) under her wing. The seductive qualities of the nieces consisted of a little bottom wiggling but were not over-emphasised, and in the quartet with Auntie and Ellen in Act 2, after the men have stormed off in search of Grimes, they sang passionately and despairingly about the childishness of men in general, giving their characters extra depth. It was a key moment. Baritone Johannes Moore was brilliant as the apothecary Ned Keene, tenor Stuart Jackson was appropriately irritating as Bible-basher Bob Boles and bass James Creswell, as the lecherous lawyer Swallow, was able to capture the stage with his rich voice and a hint of pomposity.
The opera demands plenty of ensemble work, and it received it here. In Anthony Ward's minimalist set, Opera North’s superb chorus was everywhere when needed, on and off stage, helping to hoist a huge all-encompassing fishing net which enveloped the community at work, constructing a tall wooden platform to stand for a hut next to a dangerous cliff, and swiftly putting a set of black palettes into various positions. These palettes were used to form barriers, especially in the Prologue, when Grimes was interrogated at the inquest into the suspicious death of his first apprentice. They were lined up to separate him from lawyers and everybody else, firmly establishing his status. During the storm, they were placed flat down to form walkways over imagined mud.
Gary Walker conducted the Orchestra of Opera North with great sensitivity, providing all the essential qualities to make the drama work, with all the contrasts properly brought out. The famous sea interludes were magnificent and the sense of the sea’s vastness was always there, as Britten intended as he composed with the Norfolk coast in his mind as well as his sense of what it was like to be an outsider.
