Britten On The Beach: “Peter Grimes”
After “Hamlet” in Elsinore Castle and “Tosca” in Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo, we now have Benjamin Britten’s best-known opera staged on the very beach where much of its action takes place. It was the composition of “Peter Grimes” that indelibly linked Britten’s name with that of Aldeburgh, where he made his home for the remainder of his life, but until now the work had never been fully staged there; the town, indeed the whole county of Suffolk, has no hall large enough to accommodate it. So in the year of Britten’s centenary, the centrepiece of the Aldeburgh festival is its first ever production of “Grimes,” directed by Tim Albery on a set designed by Leslie Travers of dilapidated fishing boats and timbers built right at the water’s edge on the town’s shingle beach. The North Sea provides the backdrop to the performance, with the audience on temporary seating or sitting on the shingle itself.
