Peter Grimes review – Netia Jones's brutal new production electrifies
With music that surges, pitches, billows in every bar, and a story dragged towards doom with riptide inevitability, Peter Grimes (1945) is ruled by the sea. No revelation there: on many occasions its composer, Benjamin Britten, said as much himself. He and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, who created the role of Grimes, spent most of their adult lives near the Suffolk coast, the North Sea a steely backdrop. In a new staging for Gothenburg Opera, conducted by Christoph Gedschold, the British director-designer Netia Jones has ditched the usual sea-as-metaphor idea, a handy cover-all for life's existential questions, and embraced maritime reality.
To underline the point, costumes, faded and weather-beaten, have been sprayed with salt. Workers gutting fish in white aprons are spattered with blood. Every detail reminds us of a sea that is not figurative but harsh and physical. Newly appointed associate director of the Royal Opera, London, Jones is a radical creator who uses video to original effect. This was her Gothenburg debut. She has removed the opera from its original East Anglian fishing village setting, taken from The Borough (1810), a collection of poems by George Crabbe, to a libretto by Montagu Slater.
The locale is now a remote island community off Sweden's west coast in a fictional present. Gothenburg's seafaring history – this is a port city with a Viking past – is also acknowledged. Its traditionally shaped 1,276-seat opera house, opened in 1994, is airy and ship-like, with decks, railings and walkways. Generous public funding covers 72% of its annual budget (compared with 14%, in 2022/23, at the UK's Royal Ballet and Opera).
We should say, too, that Gothenburg Opera's pioneering record of sustainability – green power, food waste turned into biogas, recycled costumes – has led the way for other opera companies (though I'm not sure any has followed their example of keeping 50,000 bees and selling the honey).
Outside in the harbour, hulls, piers and cranes shape the skyline. Jones and her team have built on all this in Grimes. What you see on stage distantly echoes what you pass on your way to the venue. Ingenious use of video projections, all filmed in the Gothenburg archipelago and to the north beyond, keeps turbulent sea and clouded sky to the fore. Action takes place on a pontoon, waters lapping below.
The rest of the set is minimal. The pitched roof of Grimes's hut mirrors that of the wooden church in which hymn-singing parishioners praise the Lord – one of Britten's characteristic musical cross-fades – before bullying the lone outsider in their midst. Colour is subdued, monochrome until, explosively, all turns lurid red for the midsummer fires and festivities, which render ordinary, hard-working people a vindictive mob (lighting design by Ellen Ruge). The sight of an effigy of Grimes hanging from a boom hook, which might usually hold a few tonnes of raw fish, is electrifying.
Every character in this large cast, mostly Swedish, singing in good, clear English, is well delineated – all worthy of mention, but with Åke Zetterström an unusually sympathetic Balstrode leading the ensemble. In the title role, the tenor Joachim Bäckström, radiant-toned and detailed, conveys the frustration of the grizzled, poetic fisherman whose carelessness towards his boy apprentices is left uncertain and complex. The massed singing-shouting of 'Peter Grimes!' by the excellent Gothenburg Opera chorus had the intensity, the ugliness, the displaced grief of a war cry. By the end, when his tormentors sing the name again, pianissimo, tuba playing its soft, fog-horn call, they sounded like briny wraiths.
The handling of the female roles revealed anew their importance to the story: the widowed schoolmistress Ellen Orford, courageously delivered by the brilliant young soprano Matilda Sterby; Auntie (a benevolent, warm-hearted Katarina Karnéus); and her twin-like, spirited nieces (Sofie Asplund and Mia Karlsson). Ellen is disturbingly, unwittingly instrumental in the tragedy. Her own dreams blind her to the truth of the situation. Auntie and the nieces are too often typified as near-sluts: not here. Their quartet, in which they meditate on the difficulties of being women in a male-dominated world, is among the most rhapsodic passages in the opera – along with the orchestral sea interludes, which act as chapter headings as the work unfolds.
Hardly well known to most opera-goers in Sweden, Peter Grimes is nevertheless not new to the country. The first ever performance outside the UK, in March 1946, was in Stockholm, with more recent stagings there, in Gothenburg and elsewhere. This production, which opened last weekend, raises an always affecting work to a different level of emotional impact. That the cast, chorus and superb orchestra were all outstanding was an equal part of the equation. The work closes, as a new day begins and the nets are brought in, with a muffled thud. At the end, the whole audience slowly rose as one, less out of normal curtain-call hoorays and excitement, though there was that too. It was more as if we were stunned at the way human cruelty, laid bare, could go hand in hand with music of such restless, elliptical and violent beauty.
Peter Grimes is at Gothenburg Opera House, Gothenburg, Sweden, until 1 April
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