Review by Eric Page
David Alden’s staging of Benjamin Britten’s first major opera was last at the Coliseum in 2014, this second revival is a night of grim fascinations.
Taken from the Victorian poem The Borough by George Crabbe, the plot of Grimes is grim indeed, he’s a rough bully from a mean family without much sympathy and in the habit of ruthlessly beating his young apprentices. Britten reworks Grimes into a misunderstood loner; a strong complex individual against a closed, narrow minded, suspicious community, but he still beats the young men, they still die.
There’s been endless conjecture and analysis of the fact that this opera reflects the queer pacifist’s nature of Britten and his partner, but here it’s more about the small-minded closed nature of British small-town life and its brutal rejection of difference than about the freedom of choice and personal complexity. There is also the clear echoes of the whipped up culture wars, misinformed mob motivated by whispered gossip and rumours, the world – Britten’s world- gone mad.
Read the synopsis here:
David Alden directs this dark and deep production as it swirls in the grey mists of some mean pinched post-war weary world. This is wide brush desolate fishing community, the set design from Paul Steinberg is rusty corrugated iron and hash lighting and the tight brutal focus is on the music and singing; everything is pared down, brutish and short.
Although flat and dull in materials, its lack of coloured detail makes it dramatically vivid. The textural lighting from Adam Silverman, and prim austerity palate costumes from Brigitte Reiffenstuel, drag the colour out of our eyes, beaching us in a claustrophobic but wide open landscape.
Gwyn Hughes Jones as Grimes is lumpen, difficult, and overwhelmed by life, changing textures and volume of his singing to share the descent of Grimes into paranoia and madness, but he never fully convinces until the madness descends. His foil in Elizabeth Llewellyn as Ellen Orford is exceptional, bringing real life and a spark of individual reason to this world of conformity and non-thinking mob action and reaction.
Llewellyn’s sharp scalpel of a voice offering no soft spaces to hide from her truth, until it’s too late, then she sores – filling the auditorium, full of warmth and hope. Together, we know they are dammed but Llewellyn’s majestic acting keeps the ultimate conclusion from us with her complex and conflicted emotional attachment.
Christine Rice as the creepy, mysterious lesbian Aunty is a crepuscular delight too, like a nightmare Aunt Sally, all rouge and roughish charm, her voice cuts to the quick of this opera and keeps us focused on the narrative tide as it flows and floods to its morbid conclusion. She holds the space and our eyes whenever on stage and her voice is as beguiling as the butch, lithe strutting. Ever-shadowed by her creepy hyper erotic nieces, danced hypnotically by Cleo Lee-McGowan and Ava Dodd, who appear to have slipped in from The Shinning and get a bit too much focus on occasion.
Veteran Anne-Marie Owens as opium addicted Mrs Sedley is the hissing judgmental voice of the mob, and is as nasty and unkind, and oddly vulnerable as the role allows.
All the solo Borough singers are wonderful, owning their cranky perverted characters, there’s not one weak voice among them and this casting provided a night of thrilling engagement with the audience.
The ENO chorus are worth swooning over in this production, their diction shrill and perfect, their movements as tight and nerve tingling as the singing and they bring a real sense of menace and fear to the night’s events. They are a human storm of contempt, each one clearly bonkers, they rise above the thin lyrics with harsh synchronised physical movement.
They snarl and jeer, catcall and howl their collective judgement on Grimes and all his supposed crimes against the town; I found them difficult to endure as they build to a terrible, vicious, vital mob. As a gay man, another outsider, this is a difficult opera to watch without squirming. They spat it out, all of them; it was terrific and terrible at the same time, quite a perfect piece of staging. I was aghast at them. Their hounding of Grimes is relentless.
Martyn Brabbins is in full control of the orchestra; they are terrifying and majestic, powering through the music with energetic wrath. He weaves the complex musical tapestries of this music allowing the seascapes of Britten’s music to flow, the famous sea interludes welling up to shift direction of the story, his passionate conducting really makes the music shine. The full orchestra joining the cast on stage was a much deserved acknowledgement of their superb musical finery.
This is an astonishingly good revival and highly recommended. It all falls into place and makes this a utterly absorbing, unnerving but thrilling evening out at the ENO, not a fun one, but one which will leave you wide eyed and breathless and happy to live somewhere outside the world of The Borough’s thuggish folk. Walking out into a sparking wet St Martins Lane, the brooding crowds of a dark September night have never looked so grey or felt so dangerous.
I’m no fan of Britten but this production is a real winner on a number of levels, with the raw power of the ENO chorus to make this a breathless event of pure theatrical electrical energy, Book now, I said now.
Until 11th October
Tickets from £10, to book or more info or to book tickets see the ENO website here:
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