★★★★★
I defy anybody to see this and not feel emotionally wrecked by the end. Wrecked but also exhilarated. Deborah Warner’s Britten staging, nurtured in Madrid last year and polished to perfection now by the Royal Opera, transports the story of the persecuted fisherman into the England of today — specifically into a bleak, boarded-up coastal town (in Michael Levine’s grimly effective designs) full of angry, left-behind people — without a single unbelievable or incongruous moment.
And Mark Elder matches her theatrical potency by conducting the sort of musical performance that scalds like boiling water, with fantastic orchestral playing and choral singing of terrifying force. Even the two or three supposedly “calmer” sea interludes (which Warner wisely allows to make their thrilling mark with the curtain down) have a bite that suggests raw North Sea winds and even rawer emotions. The start of the manhunt, with a Guy Fawkes-like effigy beaten up to an inhuman roar of bloodlust, is the most chilling thing I’ve experienced in a theatre for years.
It’s the towering individual performances, however, that will define this opera for a generation. Allan Clayton’s Grimes, sung with the sort of power that is all the more shattering for encompassing despair, is neither mad nor a sadist, although he certainly has anger issues. He is traumatised by the death of his first apprentice — whose floating body constantly haunts him, thanks to the aerialist Jamie Higgins — and by premonitions of his own suicide.
That makes him lash out at the one person trying to save him: Maria Bengtsson’s slightly light-voiced but marvellously credible Ellen Orford. One of Warner’s most devastating ideas is to have the mob attack her, ferociously, long before they hunt down Grimes. Showing the slightest compassion towards an oddball condemns you to hostility in this community. Even Bryn Terfel’s hefty and commanding Balstrode can’t keep the lid on this cauldron of hatred.
Around them are a host of exceptional actor-singers playing the best cameo roles of their careers. They include John Tomlinson’s blustery Swallow, Jacques Imbrailo’s drug-dealer Ned Keene, Catherine Wyn-Rogers’s truly intimidating Auntie, John Graham-Hall’s stridently Bible-bashing Bob Boles and Rosie Aldridge’s obsessively prying Mrs Sedley. In this show, however, even the chorus members are strikingly characterised.
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Daring ideas don’t always work on stage, but here they all do. Warner dumps the opening courtroom setting in favour of a beach scene that pre-echoes the final manhunt, then has Clayton deliver his visionary Now the Great Bear solo with his back turned to everyone, including us. It’s a brilliant visual symbol of his dysfunctional place in this cruel society.
To March 31. Streamed on April 8, roh.org.uk
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