Comes so close to greatness but succumbs to prejudice: Royal Opera’s Peter Grimes reviewed

No question, the Royal Opera is on a roll. Just look at the cast list alone for Deborah Warner’s new production of Britten’s Peter Grimes. Allan Clayton sings Grimes, Bryn Terfel is Captain Balstrode, and John Tomlinson is Swallow, with Mark Elder conducting. Even before you get to a supporting cast that includes premium names such as James Gilchrist, Jennifer France and Catherine Wyn-Rogers, you’ve basically got the three pre-eminent British male singers of their respective generations, singing their boots off in the greatest of all British operas under the baton of the conductor who (it’s naive, but let’s dream) really ought to succeed Antonio Pappano when he leaves the Royal Opera in 2024. If that’s not exactly what a flagship national opera company ought to be giving us, I don’t know what is.

And that’s just the raw talent. Throwing big names at an opera is never a guarantee of artistic success, but Warner has a grip on her company and her vision that’s as sure, and as uncompromising, as Elder’s conducting: taut, clear, and accelerating towards its conclusion with the implacable, elemental pace of the North Sea storm surges that menace Britten’s East Anglian fishing village. It smashes against your emotional defences; in between, there are moments of strange, piercing beauty, bathed in the overcast yellows and greys of Peter Mumford’s lighting designs. You reel out on to Bow Street as though you’ve been standing on a sea wall in a spring gale: scoured and buffeted, emotionally drenched – exhausted, but somehow braced by the experience.

It’s superb. But – does there have to be a ‘but’? In this case, yes, and we’ll deal with it presently. It’d be churlish, though, not to acknowledge the countless things that Warner gets right; in many cases, so right that it’s already hard to imagine them being done any other way.