Shut your eyes and enjoy

Michael Tanner

Wednesday, 20th May 2009

Peter Grimes
English National Opera

L’elisir d’amore
Royal Opera House

Norma
English Touring Opera, in Cambridge

ENO’s advertisement for its new production of Peter Grimes under David Alden, and the front of the programme, is of a surly, even aggressive youth with ropes coiled behind him. I wondered whether Alden had decided, in characteristic fashion, that the Apprentice, a silent role, was the malevolent centre of the work, manipulating Grimes and the townspeople into regarding him as a victim. No such luck. The Apprentice we get is considerably older than usual, as tall as anyone on the stage, and certainly sullen, displaying his bruise to Ellen with defiant hostility. Otherwise, he seems to be just a bored teenager, lying down whenever possible and evoking no sympathy whatever. I’d probably have been less patient with him than Grimes is.

It is characteristic of this alienating production, the most that can be said of which is that it offers a new perspective on everyone in the action, except for the curiously blank Grimes himself, that though it is often striking to look at, impressively rehearsed and detailed, it is very rarely moving. I am, admittedly, still under the sway of Opera North’s evisceratingly powerful production, which I have seen many times with growing emotion, but it can be and has been argued that it does heavily tilt things in Grimes’s favour by having the interludes acted, in a way that earns him our sympathy, as well as having a heart-breakingly moving Apprentice. Grimes is such an indeterminate work dramatically, thanks to Britten’s miserably ambivalent attitude towards his ‘outsider’ status, though he was actually at the centre of English musical life for a very long time, that it is tolerant of conflicting interpretations, many of which convince. But Alden manages to go beyond any that I have seen, by stylising character and behaviour and working in that area of perversity which is what he seems to enjoy most. Auntie, for instance, is a club-footed, trouser-suit and fur-coat wearing young lesbian, who seems to be a refugee from Lulu. Her ‘nieces’ are ludicrously dressed, act identically at every point, and spend most of the time in one another’s arms. Swallow the lawyer is a bit of a tv, coming in to the dance with a tutu over his suit. Almost no one except the transcendent Ellen of Amanda Roocroft behaves naturally.

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