Figure of mystery

What is wrong with Peter Grimes, the central figure of Britten’s eponymous opera? Or should the question be: what is wrong with Peter Grimes? For though there is no question that the opera makes a powerful and disturbing impression in a decent performance, it turns out always to be rather difficult to locate the focus of the work.

What is wrong with Peter Grimes, the central figure of Britten’s eponymous opera? Or should the question be: what is wrong with Peter Grimes? For though there is no question that the opera makes a powerful and disturbing impression in a decent performance, it turns out always to be rather difficult to locate the focus of the work.

In the revival at the Royal Opera of Willy Decker’s production, revived by François de Carpentries, there is minimal characterisation of the minor figures in the drama, though the cast-list is a starry one, and the mainly black and white staging of John Macfarlane does seem to endorse Britten’s claim that he had tried ‘to express [his] awareness of the perpetual struggle of men and women whose livelihood depends on the sea’.