A Note from Director Neil Armfield on Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes

With this production of Peter Grimes, my lovely project at Houston Grand Opera, a quartet of the greatest operas by the greatest English language opera composer, is complete: Billy Budd, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Turn of the Screw, and now Peter Grimes, the opera that really began it all — the breakthrough work that established Britten’s reputation for all time at its spectacular opening at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London on June 7, 1945.

One of the remarkable things in all these works, as markedly different as they are, is the sense of place alive in them, and the way musically that place is seen and felt through the minds of the various protagonists: we experience landscape, weather, light and atmosphere as psychological entities.

This is is true in all of Britten’s works, but especially in Peter Grimes, where Britten plays so courageously, with such originality and certainty, in almost visually creating the world that surrounds his characters. The music paints pictures not only of the sea and the land around the Borough, but also the spaces that separate people, and in those spaces we feel, we smell almost, fear and mistrust, anger and love, hope and despair.

I suppose I saw my job in this production as allowing the world that Britten creates so vividly in the music to play freely in the audience’s imagination, and I was at pains to ensure the experience of watching and listening to Peter Grimes not be blurred by too literal a representation of this world in the actual images created on stage.

I have always been fascinated by the fact that the most intense experience of a production that can generally be had is the final run-through of a play or an opera in the rehearsal studio, where, without the benefit of scenery, the story is told by the performers with the conspiracy of all minds in that room deciding to believe.

It’s not even a suspension of disbelief, it is the pleasurable act of shared participation in story, of choosing to allow the imagination to play and to be led, for a couple of hours, into the world of the characters. In a sense all of my productions in theater have been about trying to share with an audience that experience of play — to render that experience in a not entirely finished form, if you like, so that the minds of the audience are all engaged in finishing it together. And so our stage is our rehearsal hall — perhaps a version of Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall, where Britten worked amongst his community to find the musical expression appropriate to the energies, the rhythms, the dreams of his world. It is a space for the good people of the Borough to reveal their lives, to tell their story.

It is interesting that Britten went to some pains to place inside this story the author, Dr Crabbe. It provided us with the seed of an idea, perhaps, about the parental act of creating the story: Crabbe has conceived these characters, this story, and sits back as their father and watches them perform it, watches as these creations of his mind come to life and act. In reading Crabbe’s poem The Borough, the work from which the opera takes its life, I was struck by the relationship between Old Peter Grimes, the kind father, and his unhappy resentful son—our protagonist. To some extent Crabbe’s poem can be seen as a speculation on the mystery of creation—and the creation of human pain, misery, frustration. Inside our communities, our families, surrounded by the glittering beauty of the world — why are we cruel? What is the hatred? What is the fear? In 1945, at the end of the most dreadful war in human history, Britten wrote this magnificent study of a village by the sea. But he is asking all the way through it — where does our rage come from? What is the complex equation in the community, in the human heart, that results in evil?