Grimes on the Beach - review

After Hamlet in Elsinore Castle and Tosca in Rome's Castel Sant'Angelo, we now have Benjamin Britten's best-known opera staged on the very beach where much of its action takes place. It was the composition of Peter Grimes that indelibly linked Britten's name with that of Aldeburgh, where he made his home for the remainder of his life, but until now the work had never been fully staged there; the town, indeed the whole county of Suffolk, has no hall large enough to accommodate it.

So in the year of Britten's centenary, the centrepiece of the Aldeburgh festival is its first ever production of Grimes, directed by Tim Albery on a set designed by Leslie Travers of dilapidated fishing boats and timbers built right at the water's edge on the town's shingle beach. The North Sea provides the backdrop to the performance, with the audience on temporary seating or sitting on the shingle itself.

It's a wonderfully potent setting for an opera whose every bar is permeated by the sea, and Albery stages it with immense skill, unobtrusively updating the action to the time of its composition during the second world war, with an opening fly-past by a 1944 Spitfire adding a bit more colour. Some elements in the story – Balstrode and Ned Keene helping Grimes land his boat in the first act, the villagers setting off to march to Grimes' hut in the second; Grimes setting off from the beach for the final time - acquire an extra layer of realism in such a visual context, and only occasionally does the the sheer scale of the staging blur the focus of the action more than in a theatre, putting a bit too much distance between the protagonists and the audience.

Small losses, though, and on the first night too there was just enough of a fresh breeze off the sea to keep everyone well wrapped up and the sense of a community engaged in a constant battle against the elements a very real one. Watching this Grimes on a balmy, windless summer evening, you felt, would never have seemed quite right.

The soloists inevitably are amplified, though realistically enough for the ear to quickly adjust, but with sand, salt and water being just about the worst things that musical instruments can encounter, the orchestra, conducted by Steuart Bedford was pre-recorded the previous week after the two concert performances of the opera that opened the festival. That wasn't always so satisfactory, a few details loomed far larger than they ever would in a live performance, but with Bedford conducting the singers from a small shelter at the front of the performing area, the ensemble between the live and recorded elements was astonishingly precise while the chorus too, recruited from Opera North and the Guildhall School and combining their unmiked live voices with pre-recordings, was hard to fault.

So too were the solo performances. Alan Oke seems to inhabit whatever role he plays with total assurance and credibility and his portrayal of Grimes is unambiguous: this is not the wronged outsider, a misunderstood dreamer, but an unremarkable-looking man profoundly at odds with himself, capable of terrifyingly violent mood swings. All the efforts of Giselle Allen's wonderfully sincere Ellen Orford to save him from himself seem doomed from the start, and Grimes needs no urging from David Kempster's Balstrode to sail out to sea and scuttle his boat in the final scene. The other characters make a marvellous gallery, from Gaynor Keeble's Auntie and Catherine Wyn-Rogers' Mrs Sedley to Charles Rice's Ned Keene and Robert Murray's Bob Boles; all human life really is there. It's a remarkable, and surely unrepeatable achievement.