Peter Grimes

Benjamin Britten's masterpiece, Peter Grimes - made in co-production with Teatro Real in Madrid, Royal Opera House in London and Opéra National in Paris - is on stage at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma directed by the British Deborah Warner, who offers a show with deep and dramatic psychological implications, entrusted to the direction of Maestro Michele Mariotti.

The opera in three acts and a prologue crossed by six interludes, performed for the first time at the Sadler's Wells Theater in London in 1945, is inspired by the poem The Borough by George Crabbe, with a libretto by Montagu Slater and takes place entirely in a seaside town where the tormented protagonist lives, the fisherman Peter Grimes, whose little apprentice has just died.

Peter Grimes appears immediately in the work as a character who is a victim of the island community: the pharmacist Ned Keene, the carter Hobson, Captain Balstrode, the Methodist Boles, the tavern landlady Auntie Mrs. Sedley and the prosecutor Swallow in fact, they pose an insurmountable barrier of prejudice towards him, while only Ellen Orford, an elementary school teacher, shows benign feelings for him.

His way of acting, violent and tormented, becomes more and more evident as the drama progressively evolves, almost bordering on madness. All this is mainly caused by the desire for a better social situation, which however will lead him to destroy his own life and that of the poor apprentices, in an incessant desire for work. Thus the protagonist will be left to die in the sea, amidst the general indifference of the villagers.

A work symbolizing the conflict between mass and individual, Peter Grimes is a drama whose central theme is social exclusion, prejudice and the cruelty of the crowd. Deborah Warner's direction sets the story in a poor coastal town in present-day Great Britain and not in the nineteenth-century village as it was originally in the work, staging a community afflicted by poverty, full of anger and suffering, where poverty becomes mixes with resentment and prejudice, and in which the fisherman Peter Grimes becomes the victim of a society looking for a scapegoat for its own sins. 

The stage stars Allan Clayton as Peter Grimes, Sophie Bevan as Ellen Orford and Simon Keenlyside as Balstrode. Choir Master, Ciro Visco.
 

Photo credits: courtesy of Yasuko Kageyama - Rome Opera House (interior)