Peter Grimes ENO stagecraft (part 2)

"Too much sex and politics" is the usual rallying cry of those who don't like opera staging. But sometimes sex and politics are part of what the composer wanted.

There is sex in Peter Grimes, and politics too. The nieces sell their prettiness for money. And why are the townsfolk so down on Peter Grimes in an age when kids from the workhouse were treated as disposable commodities? The beauty of this new Alden production at the ENO is that he doesn't go for prurience. The nieces are little girls. However coy and culpable they may be they are too young to be predators. "Why should we be ashamed ? We comfort men from ugliness".

There's no escaping the fact that Benjamin Britten had a thing for pre-pubescent boys. David Hemmings and Scherchen junior were adamant that there was no sexual contact, and that Britten seemed more like a boy himself. Perhaps something happened to him when he was that age, fixing him forever in a fantasy world "before the fall"? It's a theme that recurs throughout his work. The apprentices become Tadzio. Is Britten grappling with his own sexuality? By modern standards, he'd probably be arrested even though, like the folks in the pub "we keep our hands to ourselves".

These days it's almost impossible to conceive of a time when homosexuality was illegal . In Britten's time even a whiff of scandal could scupper a man's career. Yet Britten never denied his orientation, which was in itself an act of courage. So Peter Grimes can be read fairly clearly as support for privacy and respect in a climate of malicious gossip. Maybe that's why Auntie looks butch ? After all, the neices are careful not to fool around til she's out of sight, another tiny detail that throws the usual assumption that the Boar is a brothel. In early 19th century Suffolk ? Perhaps implausible.

Britten was taken from his mother aged 13 and sent to boarding school where he was miserable. School was a posh kind of workhouse where boys were sent for their own good, possibly to be brutalized. Ellen and even Auntie are substitute mothers. What attracts Peter to Ellen is that she represents the nurturing he never had, even though he keeps his hut neat and orderly. Ellen's fallen middle class, so she can look pretty. Auntie's got up mannish, which doesn't necessarily mean she's a butch movie lesbian. She's a single woman running a business in a tough world.

Alden divides the men and the women of the parish when they march out of church. A barrier runs diagonally across the stage, men down one side, women down the other. Yet in real life it's not so clearcut. Auntie and Ellen do men's work, Peter would perhaps be less brutish if he knew how to. When the women talk about their lives, they form a knot, dragging Mrs Sedley in despite her resistance. She, too, was a woman once though she's shrivelled up now with meanness.

A very interesting detail is the way the nieces change after they're propositioned by Swallow. One of them wears a sailor suit, the other a kind of army drab. For the first time, they're different, playing at being adult. But the military is male dominated. What does it mean? The beauty of images liken this is that they are meant to stimulate thought, around and beyond what's immediately grasped. That's what good direction does.

Alden's crowd scenes are brilliantly choreographed. The townsfolk move in formation, like a single unit. Alden has them making hand gestures, upwards and down, so the effect is multi-dimensional, constantly in motion - like a shoal of fish. Because their costumes are drab, the whiteness of their hands and faces catches the light, like the glint of fish, writhing in a net. It's beautifully subtle, for throughout the text, there are references to "glitter", the "glitter of waves" and so on. This also underlines the musical phrases, short cascading flurries that sparkle against longer sonorities.

The excellent Opera North production centred round a net on stage, for good reason. Alden turns the crowd itself into a net, for in a way, they're all as trapped as Peter Grimes, though he's the one trying to break free.

Alden has the drummer centre stage, on his own, not part of the mob, which is often the case. This intensifies the impact of the drumming. There is no way of getting round the significance of Britten's position as a conscientious objector when the rest of the country was caught up in war frenzy. There's no war in this opera, unlike its companion piece Billy Budd. Rather Britten is dealing with the impulse that drives people towards warlike behaviour, whatever the actual cause.

When the Rector and the lawyer find Peter's hut empty, they're relieved. Yet even if there's no case, Mrs Sedley is out for blood. Peter must be punished, right or wrong. So the crowd sing "Who holds himself apart.... Him who despises us We’ll destroy" Peter must be destroyed not for what happens to his boys but because he's different, doesn't go to pubs, and thinks about rising above his station. The boys are just an excuse. "Dullards build their self esteem by inventing cruelties" sings one of the lawyers.

Hence the crowd as mindless shoal, or penned in at angles on the stage. They raise their prayer books , or lift their arms in diagonal salute. The references are subtle at first, but towards the culmination out come little Union Jack flags. This will incense a lot of people, but it's definitely in line with what Britten knew at first hand. Alden's not insulting the flag : it's the mob who insult it, by using it as a cover for their selfish cruelties. Ironically, it is fear that makes Peter drop the rope when he hears the mob approach. It's in the score.

One image I still don't understand is the fleeting glimpse of Peter, back from sea, observing the crowd unseen. He's wearing an animal head. Is this a reference to primitive sacrificial rites? Or to the idea that men are animals? Or even to Birtwistle's Minotaur, who looked like a monster but was the only untainted soul? Again, that's why intelligent stagecraft is so stimulating, it makes you think. Throughout Peter Grimes runs the idea of not making quick assumptions, so this is an opportunity to put the principle to practice.

The final scene is overwhelmingly beautiful and bleak at the same time. Sea merges with sky, the horizon very distant and obscure. That's exactly what the coast around the North Sea looks like. There are few cosy harbours. If Britten wanted Middle England he'd have lived in a suburb in the Home Counties. It's also apt as a metaphor, because it shows that rigid boundaries are not the only way, in nature as in morality. We don't need detail, for where Peter Grimes has gone is beyond our ken, where we can't possibly see. The set allows the music to take precedence. It wells up like a swell on the ocean :

In ceaseless motion comes and goes the tide
Flowing it fills the channel broad and wide
Then back to sea with strong majestic sweep
It rolls in ebb yet terrible and deep.

Peter Grimes ENO stagecraft (part 1)

A friend, who knows more about theatre than I ever will, praised the new production of Peter Grimes at the ENO. “It’s what opera direction has been leading up to for 30 years”. These days opera directors are condemned on autopilot, as if hate were a badge of honour. Of course there are some seriously moronic productions (not all avant garde or German). But operas are staged so their meaning can be enhanced. As stagecraft, this new production, by David Alden, vividly elucidates the essence of Peter Grimes.

The set is spartan. Immediately this is metaphor. Large flat planes cross the stage, like huge panels of weathered timber. Life in fishing villages is tough, the locals exposed to the elements like their surroundings. The bleakness on stage suggests at once the landscape and the desolation of those who live in it. Yet bleached timber can be beautiful. Its texture is irregular and it takes on myriad hues as the light changes.

Wide open spaces are important to the meaning of this opera. Britten contrasts the wild, unpredictability of storms with the ordered ritual in church, the endless horizons with cramped, closed spaces. Thus the courthouse, where Peter is not convicted, is fairly open plan, the crowd penned into a corner, writhing. The pub, The Boar, (a savage animal) is evoked simply by a row of solid over stuffed sofas : immobility and solidity, the illusion of comfort. Yet the storm rages, roads are flooded. The flat planes that enclose the pub careen dangerously as if at any moment they might be blown in by the gale. Auntie doesn’t believe in shutters. Lightning flashes suddenly. No wonder the nieces are scared.

Auntie’s nieces are often depicted as hardened prostitutes, for they are part of the pub's attractions. Although they're obviously complicit, there is ambiguity about their role. Hence their strange twin like behaviour. Little about them is straightforward. Depicting them as very young schoolgirls makes a lot of sense, though, for the suggestion is that they are, like the apprentices, Britten’s quintessential innocents, doomed to be corrupted.

“Is this a Christian country? Are pauper children so enslaved that their bodies go for cash?” cries Boles, when he hears a new apprentice has casually been “purchased”. He has a point. In some productions, the preacher is ridiculed like a comic book nazi or buffoon. Here, though, he’s not unsympathetic. When Swallow tries to “buy” one of the girls, there’s a connection between the nieces and the boys, often lost in less subtle productions.

Alden further reinforces the similarity between the girls and boys by having the nieces smack their toy dolls when they’re upset, as children do when they can’t deal with their own feelings. John the new apprentice also acts like an abused child, rolling up in a foetal position, too terrified to speak.

Then when Peter faces his dilemma in Act 3, Alden doesn’t have him do a wild “mad scene”. Instead, Peter seems to crumble inwards, curled up and rocking himself mindless, just like John did, just like a trapped, tortured animal. It’s incredibly painful to watch, as violent anguish at least is “adult”. The implication is that Peter, too, was an abused child, who treats his boys harshly because he knows no other way to interact. Their vulnerability reminds him of something he’d prefer not to deal with, so he lashes out. Significantly, the only time we see solid looking “brick walls” in this set is in Peter’s hut, where the walls tower like a prison, bathed in eerie green light.

This isn’t a bad rationale for Grimes's behaviour. He is brutal, but it’s directed inward, too. He asks Ellen,“Wrong to try, wrong to live, right to die”. It’s a warning, a sudden but revealing flash of insight. This production implies that Peter’s whole life has been one long, slow suicide, his attempts to better himself a cry for help. When he does face fate, it’s with curiously dignified resignation, as if he’s rehearsed the moment since he, too, perhaps was a boy from the workhouse.

Please see part 2 of this which deals with the more controversial aspects - sex, politics etc. In fact I think it says even more about the staging, the opera and Britten, but then I'm prejudiced, I wrote it. You can find it by scrolling up or looking under the subject labels on right under Britten. Look under "stagecraft" too if you want to read analyses of the stagecraft in other operas. There's more on Britten including some off the wall stuff ! This is a seriously good production, because it brings out so many deeper levels in the opera, often missed. As my friend said, it needs to be seen again and again. And read the score before deriding this production. If it's "not what Britten intended", then someone should get Britten to rewrite the opera, and make Mrs Selby the heroine.

Peter Grimes & Billy Budd, soulmates? ENO

In Britain, we get plenty of Britten and to a high standard. Productions can't get away with being merely good, they have to be excellent. From all I've heard so far about the new Peter Grimes at ENO, it's superb. Alden places the action in the 1940's, no pretence that this is the 19th century, as is often the case. This is Britten, who knew things about prejudice the original poet George Crabbe either didn't know or couldn't express. There isn't a word for British McCarthyism, but the mentality did exist, and in many forms. HERE is Edward Seckerson in the Independent, in his usual perceptive , trenchant mode, pulling no punches :

".....Even Gerald Finley's Captain Balstrode has one arm – bitten off by a shark, perhaps, or one of the locals.....But the really scary thing about Alden's production is the way in which these assorted grotesques morph into a single entity – a brutal force moved about the stage like a shoal of carnivorous fish. The climactic manhunt is the alcohol-fuelled by-product of a party in which Alden lays on a hellish vision of middle-England. The Union Jacks come out, and so does the hatred of a united national front. And the ENO Chorus – sensational throughout – are now simply overwhelming."

Grimes and Billy Budd, soulmates ? I can't wait til Saturday. Since wroiting this I've been and seen. Look at what I've written about Alden's staging in the posts marked Peter Grimes ENO parts 1 and 2.LOTS on Britten on this blog. Scroll up or look at the labels on the right or look HERE