Peter Grimes RBO 2026 ©Tristram Kenton
There are evenings at the Royal Ballet and Opera when the house itself seems to lean in and listen. Thursday’s Peter Grimes was one of them—an uneasy, salt-stung vigil that never quite let you settle, even in its most eerily beautiful passages.
This revival of Britten’s searing parable remains a grim, unflinching thing and is conducted by The Royal Opera’s very own Jakub Hrůša. The Borough is no picturesque fishing village here; it’s a pressure chamber. From the opening bars, the orchestral texture had that unmistakable tensile quality—strings tight as wire, winds cutting through like a North Sea squall. The conductor resisted any temptation to luxuriate. Instead, we got a reading that moved with purpose, sometimes brutally so, always alert to the score’s undercurrents of menace.
Allan Clayton’s Peter Grimes was not a monster, nor a misunderstood poet, but something more troubling: a man hollowed out by his own insistence on transcendence. Vocally, the role sat high and hard, and the tenor leaned into that strain rather than smoothing it over. The result was a portrait that felt perpetually on the edge of fracture—top notes sometimes barked rather than sung, but dramatically entirely apt. You didn’t warm to him; you watched him, warily, as one might watch a storm gather offshore and at the end there might even have been a touch of sympathy.
The Ellen Orford of Maria Bengtsson provided the evening’s moral centre, though not an entirely secure one. Her phrasing in “Embroidery in childhood” had a fragile inwardness, as if the character already sensed the futility of her hope. The voice itself carried a silvery clarity, though it occasionally thinned under pressure. Still, the emotional line was scrupulously maintained, and her final scenes avoided sentimentality—a welcome restraint in a role that can so easily tip into it.
The supporting cast led by Bryn Terfel’s Captain formed a properly oppressive collective. This is, after all, an opera about community as much as individual downfall, and here the chorus excelled. Their sound was not just full but characterful—gossip, suspicion, and righteousness all embedded in the vocal fabric. The great crowd scenes had a terrifying inevitability; you felt how quickly concern curdles into cruelty.
Visually, the production remains stark and elemental. The set’s shifting planes suggested both sea and psyche, never letting you forget that Grimes is as much trapped within himself as within the Borough. The lighting design by Peter Mumford was used with particular intelligence—those cold, bleached washes punctuated by sudden, almost violent shadows. Nothing felt decorative; everything served the drama.
What lingered most, though, was the opera’s refusal to resolve. The final moments were not cathartic but eerily suspended. Even the sea—so often a place of release in Britten—felt here like an accomplice. As the last notes faded, there was a pause in the auditorium, the kind that tells you the audience isn’t quite ready to return to ordinary life.
Not a comfortable evening, then. But Peter Grimes shouldn’t be. This performance understood that and pressed its case with unsettling conviction.
David Buchler, Opera Spy