Peter Grimes review – grim but compelling, Alden’s nightmarish staging returns to Coliseum

Maybe it is the harsh chiaroscuro of grit and beauty. Maybe it’s the unflinching display of community at its worst – of isolation in closeup. Either way, Britten’s Peter Grimes is an opera that gets under your skin. Its characters can haunt and its strange, stark soundworld can linger long after curtain-down.

To state the obvious, Grimes is never a cosy night at the opera. But David Alden’s award-winning 2009 production for English National Opera – back on stage for the first time since 2014 – makes for especially grim viewing. We’re in the mid-century: no Ercol in sight, just bare corrugated iron and drab Sunday best, where violence is barely concealed behind stiff upper lips. In Alden’s Borough, virtually everyone seems traumatised. Grimes has his mad scene, but is anyone really sane in a world where women wiping-down tables do so in slow motion with fixed, empty stares? Or where a folk song precipitates a zombie-like mass dance routine?

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Even the raked stage in the opening courtroom scene is aggressive, plunging towards the audience as the mob behind it (the ENO chorus at its best) jeers at Grimes. The stage pictures are striking, lit like so many nightmarish paintings in Adam Silverman’s designs. In the final scene, having run the gauntlet of the Borough’s many demons, we are suddenly confronted by the shattering beauty of an empty space – just clouds and grey, watery horizon. The demons are internal now, as Grimes raves alone before being sent to his death; Alden allows us no comfort.

In this context, casting Elizabeth Llewellyn as Ellen, Grimes’s hope and support, is a masterstroke. No comfort there either. Her gleaming, laser-like upper register is as hard as nails and she softens from the upright, uptight to the desperately warm only when it is too late. Simon Bailey’s Balstrode, Clive Bayley’s Swallow and John Findon’s Bob Boles provide huge vocal power and are, in the latter cases, unforgettably repellent. Christine Rice’s butch publican Auntie, her horror-film-ish nieces (Cleo Lee-McGowan and Ava Dodd) and Alex Otterburn’s Suffolk wide boy Ned Keene are intensely compelling. In the title role, Gwyn Hughes Jones is a conflicted and awkward Grimes, his optimistic credo (“I’ll marry Ellen!”) is shouted, the monotone of his aria “Now the Great Bear and Pleiades” effortful, his final soliloquy desperate. Through it all though, the ENO orchestra under music director Martyn Brabbins are on cut-throat form, the score’s fleeting moments of delicacy and splendour proving precious amid the roiling terror.