Singing 10, Looks 3
Tonight was Peter Grimes at the Met. The cast is generally excellent, especially Allan Clayton as Grimes. I didn’t see him in Hamlet last season, but here is outstanding -- a tortured, confused, and lost Grimes. Not so much the monstrous force of nature like Vickers, but far more unknowing than Pears. And perhaps autistic, in that he doesn’t really understand the emotional responses he elicits, so he lashes out or turns away from people. His mad scene feels real.
Nicole Carr is fine as Ellen, but it’s really a two person show here -- Adam Plachetka as Balstrode really dominates every scene that doesn’t contain Grimes. And of course, the orchestra and chorus are fantastic.
And then there’s this set. Uggh. Drab, dull & cramped in a way that a provincial English village isn’t. Director John Doyle doesn’t use the space at all -- the distance of the backwall from the front of the stage is directly proportional to the number of people on stage. To make sure our attention is focused, he needs to telegraph to who’s singing by using Laugh-in style windows. He doesn’t trust us to understand the relationships amongst the characters -- he only shows us the exact people who are interacting. (This especially makes the opening of Act III confusing -- how would anyone know there are two pubs across from each other here that people are migrating between -- I wouldn’t.) The most effective scenes are when a) he gets that damn backwall out of sight (for one of the final choral scenes when the chorus is screaming out “Peter Grimes”), and when it closes in tight on mad Peter. But the high-arching walls always make it feel artificial and stylized. And you almost wonder when that backwall comes forward, if it will push the singers into the pit. It feels like type of staging & set might work if it were a fast-paced musical, but it’s not -- it’s an opera, so this staging just drags.
9 November 2022, Met Opera, Peter Grimes
