Peter Grimes

Just back from seeing Britten's Peter Grimes at English National Opera. Only time to scribble a few notes about this superb production by David Alden, first staged in 2009 and revived this year. There was the fresh tang of sea salt in the orchestral playing, which captured every mood of the unforgiving water, from the glitter of waves to the powerful dark undertow to the unstoppable force of the tide. Conductor Edward Gardner and his ensemble rightly drew uproarious cheers from the audience.

Stuart Skelton triumphed as a Grimes as wretched as you can imagine: lonely, troubled, vilified by the no-less strange inhabitants of The Borough. It was impossible not to feel pity for the broken man presented at the end of the opera, only able to shuffle off, at the order of Captain Balstrode, to drown himself in his boat at sea. In the pared-back set for this final scene, with its grey colour palette suggesting perhaps the Suffolk landscape, where nature seemed to be confronting man; or perhaps the urban world that was taking over in the 1940s when this production was set. Or was that eerily empty space some kind of limbo between life and death? The bleakness of the scene and situation was underscored by the turning-off of the subtitles.

With its cast of villagers packed with people as undermined by their own weaknesses – laudanum, young girls – as Grimes was by his, Alden throws into the relief one of the work's main themes – the individual versus society. Who was truly responsible here for the death of Grimes's two apprentices? Are the Borough residents as culpable as Grimes? Did the abused/bullied become the abuser/bully?

It comes across a twisted place. The thought of life in this harsh, judgmental community, ruled by religious righteousness, is hard to imagine. Truth is what the community says it wants; but in reality the truth is what they are most afraid of. Moments of Britten's score seemed to have a glazed, hypnotic quality, as if the villagers were zombies, unable to escape the force of mob mentality or to think for themselves. The sense of menace was strong and unsettling. The brilliant lighting added to it all: dark shadows stalked the stage, seemingly doubling the size of the crowd, while creating the sense of strangers lurking in our midst.

And the force of that crowd, the chorus, was staggering, nowhere more so than in the hammer-blow calls of 'Peter Grimes' near the end. Even more overwhelming perhaps was the silence that came between those cries, that unremitting, unforgiving silence.