The New York Met's new production of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes
There has rarely been a work of art, in any form, that captures the monumental power and fear of the sea than Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes. The music rises and falls as the tragedy progresses with the pulse of the waves, growing ever more potent. What begins in Act I as the sparkle of the sunlight and the eery calling of seabirds ends in Act III with the full terrifying force of the watery depths into which Grimes is finally banished.
But the opera is equally terrifying in its depiction of small-town small-mindedness and how a community can crush someone that fails to follow its norm. Its depiction of communal intolerance and cruelty is as fresh and relevant today as it was when Britten finished it in 1945. As Grimes's supporter, the schoolmistress Ellen Orford, puts it: "Storm and all its terrors is nothing to the heart's despair."
In the new production at the Met in New York - the third the theatre has commissioned since 1948 - John Doyle powerfully invokes the puritanism of the English fishing folk of Britten's setting, Aldeburgh in Suffolk.
It would have been a familiar milieu for many of Thursday's opening night audience. Many of the pilgrims after all came from similar English communities and carried with them precisely that narrow puritanism that Britten rails against. The coast of New England is littered with seaside enclaves reminiscent of Aldeburgh.
Doyle's set is part English east coast, part Nantucket whaling village. It is dominated by dark, wooden fishing shacks that cleverly cope with the Met's enormous proscenium arch and conjure up the claustrophobia that closes in on Grimes as the work unfolds.
Grimes is played by Anthony Dean Griffey, a tenor from North Carolina. His singing was heavenly - it is one of the twists of the opera that Britten puts such sublime melodies incongruously into the mouth of a man in torment, and Griffey makes the most of it.
I'd quibble though with his characterisation of Grimes, which is perhaps over obvious in depicting him as a mentally unbalanced and violent child abuser of the physical variety (there is no suggestion of sexual motives in Griffey's portrayal). The man sitting next to me at the Met huffed and puffed as Griffey threw the boy across the stage, saying that Grimes was innocent and that Griffey had got him all wrong.
I don't see Grimes as innocent. The whole power of the opera is in its ambiguity - we don't know what demons are eating at him, and we are left wondering to what extent, if any, the "borough's" persecution of him was justified. Yet the role calls for a bit more subtlety than Griffey gave it.
Patricia Racette was sublime as Ellen Orford, and overall the production was strong, though I thought the final act jarred when Doyle opens up the stage and floods it with brilliant white light. That cleverly invokes the rushing in of the sea, but he spoils the effect by plonking what looks like a cruise liner structure at the back of the stage. It's the achilles heel of the opera director - being too clever by half.
