‘Peter Grimes’ at the WNO: bullying and nobility

Hooray for Welsh National Opera, who are taking their new production of Britten’s Peter Grimes from Cardiff to Southampton (30 Apr), Birmingham (10 May), Milton Keynes (17 May), and Plymouth (7 June). This new staging by Melly Still is riveting.

Gone is the ambiguity of whether Grimes can be held guilty for the deaths of his apprentices. This Grimes is a bully. He has pushed his apprentice boys beyond their capabilities, so it is no wonder that the inhabitants of The Borough (a fictional small town on England’s east coast, not unlike Britten’s home of Aldeburgh) dislike him. In his favour is the fact that he is a weather-wise and skilled fisherman, even if, in modern terminology, he’s obsessive-compulsive. That elicits some sympathy for him, and the young widow Ellen Orford cares deeply about him.

She is vital to him, as he admits when he says, “My only hope depends on you. If you take it away, what’s left?” In the end he loses his new apprentice to yet another accident, as the boy falls from a rope leading from Grimes’s hut to the beach. We see the youth’s fright as it happens, and this production conveys the tragedy of a man whose bullying tendencies do not allow him to understand that others cannot be as tough or strong as he is.

What he wants is to buy respect through his immense success as a fisherman, and although Captain Balstrode sympathetically advises him to move elsewhere to work, perhaps on a merchant ship or privateer, Grimes says, “I am native, rooted here … by familiar fields, marsh and sand, ordinary streets, prevailing wind”. There are hints of Grimes as a poet, which becomes obvious during the storm in Act I as most of the men take shelter in the tavern and Grimes sings of the Great Bear and Pleiades drawing up the clouds of human grief, breathing solemnity in the deep night.

One can understand what Ellen sees in him, but he is a tragic character whose fatal flaw involves an obsession with earning money by catching huge quantities of fish, so that people will respect him. He won’t marry Ellen until he’s achieved that, even though Captain Balstrode tells him she’d gladly take him now.

Nicky Spence made a superb Grimes, physically and vocally, with Sally Matthews as a very attractive and sweet voiced Ellen. David Kempster is an imposing and sympathetic Balstrode, who advises Grimes at the end to take the boat out to sea and sink her. That he actually does so speaks to a hidden nobility in the man, making clear why Ellen and Balstrode like him.

But this opera is much more than just these three people. The Welsh National Opera chorus were simply magnificent, Dominic Sedgwick was a delight as the apothecary who supplies laudanum to the superb Mrs Sedley of Catherine Wyn-Rogers, and Sarah Connolly was wonderful as Auntie, the knowing pub landlady with a twinkle in her eye. Her nieces Fflur Wyn and Eiry Price sang well, particularly in the Act II quartet with Auntie and Ellen. The many solo roles were performed with great vocal skill, including Oliver Johnston as the fisherman Bob Boles, Sion Goronwy as Swallow the lawyer, Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts as the Reverend, and particularly Callum Thorpe as a very strongly sung Hobson, the carrier, who at first declines to bring another apprentice to Grimes but relents when Ellen says she will accompany him.

I loved the staging that included the new apprentice and the earlier deceased apprentice on stage, with the hull of a boat suspended from above. When Grimes sings of the stars, we actually see the night sky filled with them. This production works very well, and Britten’s music is given just the right shade and tension under the excellent baton of WNO’s music director Tomáš Hanus. Unmissable. At the final curtain the chorus wore T-shirts saying “Save Our ENO”. Quite right too: Arts Council England, please note.

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