FIRST NIGHT
Peter Grimes review — Opera North’s Britten is riveting
Phyllida Lloyd’s exceptional 2006 staging of Britten’s 1945 tragedy, revived at the Grand in
Leeds, features some fine singing and a superb orchestra
John Findon as Peter Grimes and Philippa Boyle as Ellen JAMES GLOSSOP
Richard Morrison, Chief Culture Writer
Numerous fine productions of Peter Grimes have come and gone since Phyllida Lloyd’s Opera
North staging arrived 20 years ago. Britten’s 1945 tragedy, of a coastal community hounding a
fisherman who has the deaths of two boys against his name, is one of those harrowing
masterpieces that seem director-proof.
Yet Lloyd’s treatment, revived at the Grand in Leeds, has always struck me as exceptional.
Dispensing with scenery except for a murky, very East Anglian seascape, she and the designer
Anthony Ward opt instead for sparse, symbolic objects: ropes, a giant net hoisted like some
ritualistic communal totem, and wooden crates often assembled into barricades. The
metaphors are powerful. It’s not fish enmeshed in that net, it’s people — trapped in a village that
protects itself as much against its own misfits as against storms and landslides.
That almost bare stage places the emphasis on vivid crowd movements — nothing more
terrifying than the bloodlust manhunt where a grotesque effigy is ripped apart. And Lloyd also
uses the sea interludes to deepen our understanding of Grimes’s tormented soul. Before a note
has sounded the village children have come across his dead body. Those children will be seen
bullying the boy apprentice in the Sunday Morning interlude, just as (we surmise) Grimes
himself was bullied as a child. The Passacaglia shows Grimes’s hopelessly idealised vision of
the future. All very effective, but the image seared into my mind comes in the Moonlight
Interlude, where he lifts the dead apprentice over his head in a gesture that seems part anguish,
part rage at malevolent fate.Claire Pascoe as Mrs Sedley and Johannes Moore as Ned Keene
John Findon is Grimes for this revival: a shambling, massive, disruptive figure with a blazing
tenor (though he seemed close to losing it by the end). He mostly comes across as driven but
benign, but the moment when he fells Philippa Boyle’s homely, careworn Ellen with a punch is
shocking. Other standout performances include Simon Bailey’s staunch Balstrode, Claire
Pascoe’s obsessively interfering Mrs Sedley and Johannes Moore’s sardonic Ned Keene.
The chorus is superb, particularly when hurling spine-shaking cries in our faces, and so is the
orchestra. Garry Walker, conducting, doesn’t just generate primordial fury, he also brings out the teeming detail that adds do much pace and atmosphere to this riveting show.