Peter Grimes
Sydney Opera House
Until 30 October
Tickets $68-256
Bookings (02) 9250 7777
Critic’s Rating 8/10
As published in the Sun Herald
There’s nothing quite like a lynch mob to get the dramatic pulses racing. As with football, viewers like siding with the under-dog, hoping that the mob gets punished for succumbing to
group mentality.
Peter Grimes is a reclusive subsistence fisherman living in an isolated sea port on the English coastline. Different from the rest the community, in a Boo Radley type of way, he is viewed with suspicion when his young apprentice is found dead after a fishing expedition.
Writing at the height of World War II, the composer Benjamin Britten and his partner, Peter Pears, returned to England from the US with the idea to turn an 1810 poem by George Crabbe into opera.
Sydney Opera House
Until 30 October
Tickets $68-256
Bookings (02) 9250 7777
Critic’s Rating 8/10
As published in the Sun Herald
There’s nothing quite like a lynch mob to get the dramatic pulses racing. As with football, viewers like siding with the under-dog, hoping that the mob gets punished for succumbing to
group mentality.Peter Grimes is a reclusive subsistence fisherman living in an isolated sea port on the English coastline. Different from the rest the community, in a Boo Radley type of way, he is viewed with suspicion when his young apprentice is found dead after a fishing expedition.
Writing at the height of World War II, the composer Benjamin Britten and his partner, Peter Pears, returned to England from the US with the idea to turn an 1810 poem by George Crabbe into opera.
With librettist Montagu Slater, Britten creates a world much like John Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men where Grimes is objectified and beaten down like Lennie Small by a ruthless community.
Director Neil Armfield, along with designers Ralph Myers, Tess Schofield and Damien Cooper, has set the action in a community hall that can quickly turn from a warm hub of social interaction to a place more daunting and cold.
A coronial inquest clears Grimes of the incident but the community is distrustful and gossip escalates when he is given another apprentice. His love-interest, Ellen Orford, is one of his only friends but she succumbs to communal gossip.
Britten’s Peter Grimes is a haunting modernist composition that won’t be everyone’s cup of tea and Armfield honours the score’s meditative qualities with simple stagecraft and a lighting design that evokes the horizontal shadows of an Alfred Hitchcock film.
More often than not it is just the solitary figure of George Crabbe (played by Peter Carroll), the original author of the poem, who strolls through the hall in between scenes and moves chairs, creating a theatre within a theatre.
Stuart Skelton is born to play the role of Grimes, his tenor voice opening with such beauty and clarity in the opening scene, only to descend into the more chaotic expressionism as the mob chases him from his hut. Susan Gritton, as the simple Ellen Orford is beautiful and Peter Coleman-Wright, as Grimes’s only other friend, Captain Balstrode is grittily perfect.
Peter Grimes is a harsh world that came out of the destruction of a war that tore the world apart. Its programming post-September 11 is inspired and shows that the mob mentality is as prolific as ever.
Director Neil Armfield, along with designers Ralph Myers, Tess Schofield and Damien Cooper, has set the action in a community hall that can quickly turn from a warm hub of social interaction to a place more daunting and cold.
A coronial inquest clears Grimes of the incident but the community is distrustful and gossip escalates when he is given another apprentice. His love-interest, Ellen Orford, is one of his only friends but she succumbs to communal gossip.
Britten’s Peter Grimes is a haunting modernist composition that won’t be everyone’s cup of tea and Armfield honours the score’s meditative qualities with simple stagecraft and a lighting design that evokes the horizontal shadows of an Alfred Hitchcock film.
More often than not it is just the solitary figure of George Crabbe (played by Peter Carroll), the original author of the poem, who strolls through the hall in between scenes and moves chairs, creating a theatre within a theatre.
Stuart Skelton is born to play the role of Grimes, his tenor voice opening with such beauty and clarity in the opening scene, only to descend into the more chaotic expressionism as the mob chases him from his hut. Susan Gritton, as the simple Ellen Orford is beautiful and Peter Coleman-Wright, as Grimes’s only other friend, Captain Balstrode is grittily perfect.
Peter Grimes is a harsh world that came out of the destruction of a war that tore the world apart. Its programming post-September 11 is inspired and shows that the mob mentality is as prolific as ever.
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