"Some shall be pardoned, and some punishèd" - Grimes in Newcastle

Time to reflect on the performance of Peter Grimes at Newcastle yesterday.

This was an excellent opportunity to experience this production in yet another of the wonderful Victorian theatres that populate Britain. After walking out into the bone-grindingly cold Northern night, I settled in to watch Grimes for a second time with the Opera North company. The Theatre Royal is a grand old dame that showcases a wonderfully diverse range of plays, musicals and other live theatre. I think it’s great that the people of Newcastle have such a place to migrate on cold winter nights, which is easily the equal of any West End theatre.

The curtain opens to foreshadow the events to come, and the spotlight turns quickly to the events of village life. We are in a courtroom. Grimes has been accused of murdering one of his young fishing apprentices, who died while the pair were at sea. The events that occurred are never completely revealed by Benjamin Britten, and instead left deliberately ambiguous. At any rate, Grimes is let off - but not before he is warmed by the magistrate that “this is the sort of thing folks are apt to remember.”

Throughout the opera, we experience several moments which deliver the distinct feeling that Grimes should be able to escape his fate by taking logical steps – and yet he seems unable to be able to draw himself out from underneath the inexorable wheels of fate. “Who?” He asks, “Who can turn skies back and begin again?”

Peter Grimes is a maddening, frustrating character. He leaves himself subject to the fickle whim of destiny, seemingly refusing to take any action in charting the course of his own life. Too many times in the opera you are left asking why he won’t listen to some – any – of the advice given to him by those who genuinely care. The good, warm hearted Ellen Orford should be his salvation – a woman with whom he dreams of starting all over again, his one shot. So why doesn’t he take it? He promises over and over “I’ll marry Ellen!” Yet the collective force of the village and, as Ellen puts it, “his constant work”, are all consuming. Balstrode suggests he leaves the borough, but Grimes just cannot move beyond his psychological ties to the place.

A man like Grimes who was an outcast in the era Britten was writing would today be believed to be suffering from a form of mental illness. The hallucinations, the delusions of grandeur and narcissism, the separation of the self from reality –  all of this points to a man who is deeply disturbed. Britten seems to encourage us to take Grimes’ mental illness with a grain of salt, almost as a sideline to his treatment at the hands of the villagers. And he does paint their characters in broadly villainous strokes, giving each of them cartoonish vices. But Britten too often ignores the burning questions about who Grimes really is in favour of the minutiae of smalltown life. Yet, while vital to Grimes’ story, it is difficult to believe that  the village is entirely responsible for the events that occur. Should the village have given Grimes a second, a third, chance? In some ways, it is a cop out that Britten paints every other aspect of the Grimes story in such black and white terms, yet even when two of his apprentices die, Grimes is reprieved from the same condemnation the audience is encouraged to feel towards the villagers when they turn on him.

To understand Grimes’ predicament, we have to accept that while the villagers are deeply flawed, Grimes is inherently good, but bound somehow by external forces to a luckless life of psychological torment and unending labour. We have to suspend our disgust at Grimes’ maltreatment of his apprentices and Ellen – by excusing his actions, in a way complying with him – and we have to overlook the fact that potentially two young children have died in his “care.” Britten asks us to believe that the maliciousness of the borough gossip is the true enemy, forcing the hand of the events that occur, but is it? Is it enough to excuse what occurred? Who should be pardoned and who should be punished?

Without a sympathetic anti-hero, the deal is sunk. Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts has his moments, but really only comes into his own in the final scene, when with all the passion of years of unrequited dreams he confronts fate head on. Unfortunately, the rest of his performance does not build convincingly to this moment – while the ending is powerful, the emotions feel slightly tacked on because the rest of the performance lacks momentum. Lloyd Roberts’ high and often straight toned tenor voice does not have enough heft for the demanding role of Grimes, and consequently the big climactic moments fall flat. Perhaps he is looking to obtain a boyish quality in his vocal performance in an effort to capture Grimes’ child-like nature. He presents a sympathetic Grimes, but other facets are missing – without the vocal presence and the real threat of pent-up violence bursting forth onstage, Grimes appears a weaker character rather than the soulful, emotionally complex man-child that Britten envisaged.

This is an inherently human story about a misunderstood man and the events that sometimes occur despite our best intentions to do right in the world. There is a bit of Grimes in all of us.

Music: I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls - Balfe