Allan Clayton as Peter Grimes, RBO, (c) Tristram Kenton 2026
Britten Peter Grimes
The Royal Opera / Jakob Hrůša
Covent Garden, London, May 8, 2026
Like it or loathe it (and I love it), as a theatrical experience Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes should be overwhelming. The opera’s complex of dramatic planes, each hugely compelling in their own right, shifts the focus between portraits of the visionary loner, Grimes, at odds with the earthbound society he lives within and that very society itself: “The Borough”, the neutrality of its name is in inverse proportion to its inner corruption and meanness of spirit, set against the implacable sea and storm that dominate all existence within the village. Britten’s conception requires all the component parts – solo singing, the chorus, the orchestra (so vital in the six Interludes that punctuate and contextualise the action), and the staging itself – to function in harmony to a degree rare even in modern opera.
Deborah Warner’s staging was created during lockdown for Teatro Real in Madrid and premiered there in 2021 with the chorus wearing masks (illustrated in the programme book). With a set designed by Michel Levine (intended to reflect the starker aspects of rundown Suffolk fishing villages), costumes by Luis F. Carvalho and lighting by Peter Mumford, it reached Covent Garden the following year and this is its first British revival since then. Many of the Madrid production’s cast also returned, most notably Allan Clayton in the title role, Maria Bengtsson as Ellen Orford, Catherine Wyn-Rogers as the landlady, Auntie, and Clive Bayley as Magistrate Swallow. Also back is Bryn Terfel, in a scene-stealing turn as Balstrode, having replaced Christopher Purves for the UK premiere. Yet it is Clayton who dominates proceedings, compelling attention every time he is on stage, whether in the Prologue’s inquest – rendered here as a fevered dream on the shore as Grimes tosses in uneasy slumber – or his largely mute presence in Scene 1 as he quietly land his catch, or the key aria “Now the Great Bear and Pleiades”, delivered with an intensely human lyricism that many a performer lacks. While Clayton’s singing of the part is marvellous, it is the humanity with which Clayton inhabits the role of Grimes – as a deeply flawed visionary, quick to anger, but not the villain his unsympathetic Borough neighbours believe – that defines Warner’s compelling production.
Flawed humanity applies to all the characters in this vivid drama (except perhaps the unfortunate apprentice whose accidental death at the close of Act 2 precipitates the opera’s great final crisis). Bengtsson gives a strongly sung, quietly radiant interpretation of the compassionate Ellen, her love for Grimes as clear as it is clearly repressed. Terfel’s Balstrode proves a stronger mediating presence – for the townsfolk as much as Grimes – but it is the ensemble and chorus’s collective depiction of the Borough’s inhabitants themselves that is almost the strongest element on display. True, the mutation of them into the raving lynch mob in Ac 3, whipped up by Mrs Smedley (Christine Rice, impressive as Sister Helen Prejean in ENO’s Dead Man Walking last year), did not quite achieve the vivid menace of that in David Alden’s 2023 Grimes for ENO, as they advanced stage-front bellowing Grimes’s name at the audience as if we were the miscreant, but Warner’s intention here was different. (Price, by the way, was the notable Auntie in that version.)
If the choral acting and singing is vibrant, multi-layered and superbly rendered so, too, is the orchestral contribution. Indeed, this is a superlative production musically, every strand kept taut and true by conductor Jakob Hrůša, even more successfully so than in The Makropoulos Case last winter. Nowhere is that evidence better than at the apex of Act 3, where the fully scored depiction of the lynch mob, baying for Grimes’s blood, transforms into the sixth and most ethereal of the interludes (so subdued and disparate in character it failed to make the cut for the concert suite), and finally Grimes’s final soliloquy, for the most part unaccompanied. This extraordinary transition in texture from full chorus and orchestra to a single, unsupported voice lost nothing in intensity and power in Hrůša’s hands.
And, yes, this Peter Grimes is overwhelming.
Peter Grimes plays for five further performances at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on May 12, 15, 21, 25, finishing on Thursday May 28.