ENO’s Peter Grimes shows a major international company operating at full artistic power 

In David Alden’s production of Peter Grimes, the mob assembles before the music has even started – silhouetted at the back, muttering and menacing. Ah, Britten’s mob: simultaneously the source of some of the most electrifying, elemental choral writing since Mussorgsky and a licence for British directors to indulge in premium-strength snobbery. Fully endorsed by the composer, of course: it’s essential to Britten’s artistic schema that we believe the inhabitants of small-town England are only ever one beer away from forming a lynch mob. As their hatred boils over, Alden has them pull out little Union Flags, completely without pretext. There’s no trace of political nationalism anywhere in the libretto or score. 

It’s a curious way to read this unsettling opera. Surely it’d be all the more unsettling if we felt that we could be part of that crowd? Instead, we’re reassured that these ghastly provincials are absolutely not Our Sort of People. At least Alden is not aiming for naturalism. Apparently The League of Gentlemen was broadcast in Poland under the title Town of Maniacs and that seems to be the general vibe here. Justice Swallow (Clive Bayley) cavorts in a tutu. The Nieces are a pair of robot schoolgirls from a Japanese horror movie, and Auntie (Christine Rice) is a pinstriped she-dandy straight out of George Grosz. Possibly she’s meant to evoke Radclyffe Hall, who lived in Rye: the kind of seaside town, one imagines, with which opera directors feel more comfortable. 

And yet, and yet. Every time I see Peter Grimes, doubts resurface; and every time, genius exerts its tidal pull. It’s just too alive, too right. Britten’s fundamental artistry asserts itself to create a world of salt air and windswept shingle that transcends the attendant silliness, drawing characters who live independently in the imagination long after the curtain falls.