|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Glyndebourne Grimes
| Article
# : |
19945 |
|
|
Section : |
THE ARTS
|
| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
1,625 Words |
| Author
: |
Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
It has been an eventful year for Britain's Glyndebourne Festival Opera. This summer's season, the last before the famous country-house theater is completely rebuilt, quite literally fell under a cloud in May when a mysterious fire (suspected but not proved to be arson) totally destroyed an outbuilding filled with sets and props for several of the current productions. Some sets and furniture, especially for the touring company, had to be completely remade. Other productions lost less and proceeded with very minor repairs. One of these was Glyndebourne's new staging of the Benjamin Britten opera Peter Grimes, which opened the 1992 festival.
The production was directed by Trevor Nunn, formerly the head of the Royal Shakespeare Company and better known in America as director of the Broadway spectacle Les Miserables. Nunn's RSC background has given him a taste for "director's theater," in which an original stage work (usually a classic) becomes partly or wholly a vehicle for the director's rather than the composer's and/or writer's, ideas and intentions. This approach--tested to bathos and destruction by directors like Peter Sellars--appeared with mildly pathological effect in Nunn's version of Peter Grimes.
Except for a curious and not very successful setting of the American folk tale Paul Bunyan, Grimes was Britten's first opera, premiering in June 1945. He and his librettist, Montagu Slater, took the story (or rather passages and characters) from the 1810 poem The Borough, by George Crabbe.
Profound Alteration
The character of fisherman Peter Grimes himself was profoundly altered in the transference from page to stage. In the poem he is an unambiguously bad lot, vicious as child and man, brutal, sadistic, murderous, a blot on the human landscape of a Suffolk fishing village. He dies in bed, ranting of visions of hellfire and haunted by the wraiths of his dead father and the boy apprentices whose deaths Grimes caused.
The Grimes of Britten and Slater is not quite like that. His apprentices too have died, and he is rumored to have killed them. But the community who suspects him--with the exception of Balstrode, a crusty sea caption, and Ellen Orford, the schoolmistress whom Grimes hopes to marry--are a mean-minded, ugly, gossipy lot, unwilling to believe that the boys could have perished by accident, as in fact happened (the fishing life is very dangerous). The opera opens with a coroner's court at which the reclusive Grimes is
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
