Poor Peter Grimes

Last Friday, I had a great night out at Nottingham's Theatre Royal to see a performance by Opera North of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes. Expectations were high: I don't think I've ever seen a whole performance of this opera live, though I definitely remember walking out of Jon Vickers' mangling of the role at a performance in Covent Garden sometime in the 1980s! Let me say at the outset that I enjoyed the evening, on the whole. The orchestra played wonderfully and the chorus sang vividly: no complaints there, at all. They were thrilling to hear. Balstrode and Swallow were sung magnificently; Ellen Orford was sung rather well; Bob Boles' was also a strong performance. Unfortunately, Auntie was sung by someone who simply couldn't get down to the low alto notes and therefore was practically inaudible throughout. Peter Grimes was also not sung brilliantly: his Act 1 was fine. His mad scene was histrionic without emotion. And throughout, his top notes just weren't really there. When your eponymous hero can't quite sing the best parts of the role, you have a bit of a problem, I feel!

All that said, the music wasn't the main problem of the evening. That belongs with the director. The opera is supposed to open with a “bang!”: “Peter Grimes, Peter Grimes, we are here to investigate the cause of death of your apprentice, William Spode”. Straight in, no messing, scene set, backstory explained, all done within 20 seconds of the conductor raising his baton. What we got in Nottingham was some sort of “pantomime”, in which the curtain rose, silence descended and a torso wrapped in fishing nets was 'discovered' by children scampering across the stage. Presumably, this was the body of William Spode: though I have to say it was an exceptionally well-developed torso of a thirty year-old, not exactly your weedy boy apprentice that William Spode is supposed to have been. Regardless of the incongruent torso's physique, however, the point is: the opera doesn't require a stupid pantomime to contextualise the rest of the action. That's done for you in the first 18 words of the opera, blasted into the auditorium within seconds of the music starting. The pantomime was just the director trying, one presumes, to spoon-feed a context to an opera-illiterate audience. I didn't appreciate it, shall we say?

Worse, the ending: Peter Grimes is supposed to sail off until he loses sight of land, then sink his boat. The Borough's population is then meant to get on with their lives, essentially as if nothing much had happened. Curtain down, cue the applause. What we got, instead, was the music ending but the cast staying on stage swaying ridiculously from side to side with a giant net (see the thumbnail above), which made 'swooshing' sounds as it moved. This lasted an excruciating few minutes before the curtain finally descended and applause ensued. The swooshing sound was, of course, intended to sound like the sea (as some excited woman on the way out of the venue announced she had discerned). The trouble is that the sea is not meant to be a protagonist in the opera, with the last word. It's a character, of course, with varying moods, from thundering storm to twinkling sunlight on glittering waves. But it isn't the villain of the piece: that role is reserved to the people of the Borough whose conformity and resentfulness of difference and vision is what dooms Grimes. Theirs is supposed to be the last word: “Coastguard reports, there's a boat sinking out at sea… I see nothing… Just one of these rumours… move on”. If you detract from that conclusion, you lose the whole point of the opera: of the visionary dreamer against a constrained, conventional society; of the outsider against the indifferent crowd. Opera North comprehensively missed the point: we don't need nets sounding like the sea to conclude this opera. We just need the Borough to shrug its collective shoulders and get on with life, dismissive of the visionary it has just destroyed. The ending of the performance was as gormless as its opening, basically.

I didn't like the staging much, either. When the libretto mentions “Grimes' hut”, you kind of expect “a hut”, not something that looked like a curtailed oil rig in the North Sea (see picture at the right). I'm prepared to suspend my disbelief quite willingly… but no man could live comfortably on a 12 foot square of timber in the upper atmosphere! Watching the new apprentice get hitched to a wire before falling off said platform was just excruciating. He's meant to walk out of a hut, close the door… and then we hear him scream as he falls down the cliff off-stage. There's neither reason nor point in making the poor lad do a leap in the centre of the stage, even with a harness laboriously attached. It just looked stupid.

I won't mention (OK, I will) the fact that there are really two big emotional fulcrums in the piece: the clash between Grimes and Ellen outside the Church on Sunday, and Grimes' mad scene. Unfortunately, the Nottingham audience wasn't playing ball for either key moment. During the outside-Church confrontation, a fellow in the rows behind me decided he was going to have some sort of epileptic fit. Which is absolutely fine: these things happen and my sympathies were definitely with him. Unfortunately, his fit took the form of rather loud and continuous moaning and instead of getting him out of the auditorium with all due haste and minimum fuss, this went on throughout the piece. Key moment #1 missed entirely. The lady in the row behind me then decided she would have a coughing fit throughout the Grimes mad scene. Again, I wouldn't have minded so much, except that she apologised to everyone around her in a rather loud stage whisper. Which was, perhaps, considerate… except that she then chose to round things off by getting out the throat sweets and unwrapping them throughout what remained of the mad scene. Key moment #2 thereby ruined.

I lay those misadventures at the feet of the idiotic public, not those of Opera North, of course. But the ham-fisted production of this opera is all their own doing and the less-than-stellar performances of Grimes and Aunty are equally of their own creation. Full marks to the chorus and orchestra, however… and extra marks to the Theatre Royal: it's a proper 'traditional' opera house, in green and gold, in the raked-box style of La Scala and with a most impressive chandelier! I had no idea Nottingham was blessed with such a beauty (and I lived there for six years!).

Overall, 7/10 for the orchestra, chorus and powerful Act 1. Points off for completely unnecessary and misguided prologue and epilogue 'pantomimes', the weak performances from two key singers and the (expected) dreadful behaviour of assorted members of the public. There are reasons I don't go to live performances of opera very often: this outing reminded me of what they are.