Opera North at Sadler’s Wells

26th February 2008

It’s always the same with Britten. I spend the first fifteen minutes or so thinking this is just too modern for me. Twenty minutes in, I love it. It’s always a surprise how easy it is to find tunes in Britten’s operas. I’ve seen Albert Herring in the same theatre and there’s a wonderful film of Owen Wingrave.

This production of Peter Grimes has won awards, and you can see why. Don’t know how many of the cast were in the original production, but the people I saw were really good. The story is based around Peter Grimes, but one of the things I really liked about the opera is that it’s really an opera about a group of people, and they all have characters.

So does the orchestra. In Peter Grimes, it’s not just there to provide atmosphere even though there’s a lot of that, it’s not just there to play the tunes. They wer really obviously the character of the sea. There’s loads of music about the sea where you can almost hear the waves by listening to it, Peter Grimes has some of the best I’ve heard. Not just in the sea interludes either, there’s just little bits here and there all the way through the opera. Richard Farnes was the conductor, he really must be good to have got the orchestra to play so atmospherically.

There’s not much set, although the way they did the sandy beach was really clever. When I saw how bare the stage was mostly it was hard to understand why the production won awards, but in the end it was obvious. It lets you focus on the characters more and there were so many really brilliant performances.

I used to think opera singers couldn’t act. I know they can now but performances like Peter Grimes seem to be saying that opera singers can not only act well, some of them can act a lot better than some of the famous actors you see in films. Any film actor who wants to play a sympathetic character who does bad things should watch Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts as Peter Grimes. He was disturbing in lots of ways, but really felt he was mad rather than nasty, not that he should get away with some of the things he was doing, but that maybe he would have been okay in a more understanding environment.

I can’t really blame the people for not understanding them though. Even now, there are lots of people who either don’t care about mentally ill people or don’t believe it’s a real illness. There are definitely some nice people in the village, like ‘Auntie’, a pub landlady and ‘comforter of men’, she called it. It would be easy to dislike someone like her, but at least in Yvonne Howard’s performance you can see she’s a nice person. Her two ‘Nieces’, Amy Freston and Claire Booth, were both very attractive in an overdone way, but they seemed more like very flirtatious teenagers than prostitutes. I liked everyone really, especially Ethna Robinson as Mrs Sedley the village gossip, Roderick Williams as Ned Keene and Stephen Richardson as Hobson.

Giselle Allen as Ellen Orford wasn’t quite as good as everyone else, her voice was quite shrill and her acting wasn’t as good, but I can’t blame her for not concentrating on her acting when she’s struggling to make her voice work. They had a real boy as Grimes’ apprentice called Aaron Eastwood, he did really well, hope Jeffery Lloyd-Roberts’ performance didn’t give him nightmares, the opera would probably have had an 18 or at least 15 rating at the cinema. Really liked Jonathan Summers as Balstrode. He was always kind to Peter Grimes and he seemed like a good person, and his actions at the end really seemed like the best thing he could have done. Lovely voice as well even though he must have been tired singing Gepetto in Pinocchio as well.

Madam Caterpillar

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