ABSTRACT
Peter Grimes is a play. It really, truly is: the teacher and educationalist Michael Marland staged a new theatrical adaptation of Crabbe’s poem, which borrowed a title and not much else from Benjamin Britten’s opera, at Crown Wood School in Eltham, South London, in 1971. Sarah Lucas even moved into a house Britten once owned. Such is the impact of a great work. In fact the only major art form that doesn’t seem to have benefited much from the Suffolk renaissance that began with Peter Grimes is theatre. It need hardly be stated that Peter Grimes is an artwork about the sea. If the sea is Peter Grimes’s antagonist, and the weather is its engine, then its representation of the land defines the work’s dimensions, the space between its three worlds: the sea, the Borough and a surrounding landscape of ‘shore, / The marsh, the fields’.
