ABSTRACT
In June 2013, the Aldeburgh Festival celebrated its founder’s centenary by staging his best-known opera in a manner that could hardly have done more to brutalise his music. Grimes on the Beach, a production of Peter Grimes that was performed over three nights on the very shoreline that first gave George Crabbe, and then Benjamin Britten, a setting for their stories of Suffolk fisherfolk life, submerged the composer’s achievement in a site-specific storm of ambient sound. The temptation to see Grimes on the Beach as a community project, and to look for its origins and significance there, was heightened by its companion piece in the 2013 Aldeburgh Festival programme. Accepting Peter Grimes as a play could open up Britten’s toolbox – a set of unfashionable energies and English tropes as absent from contemporary performance as the phantoms of Wilson and Glass and the New York avant-garde remain over-represented – for a new generation of theatre-makers.
