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Stuart Skelton
Stuart Skelton performs Peter Grimes on Thursday in Brisbane. Photograph: Stephanie Do Rozario
Stuart Skelton performs Peter Grimes on Thursday in Brisbane. Photograph: Stephanie Do Rozario

Peter Grimes review: show goes on despite nightmare mishap

This article is more than 5 years old

Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane
Cast rallies after star singer Stuart Skelton suffers pollen allergies during opera

It was meant to be the icing on the festival cake. Instead it became the stuff of nightmares.

On the opening night of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes – the headline act for Brisbane festival, directed by Daniel Slater and brought to Australia after ecstatic reviews in the UK – the star singer Stuart Skelton was suddenly taken sick.

After a shaky act one in which Skelton was clearly unwell, David Berthold, the festival’s artistic director, addressed the audience apologetically. Skelton, he said, would be unable to continue.

And yet the show must go on. Scrambling for a solution, the understudy, Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts, sang the role from the sidelines, reading from the libretto with his glasses perched on his nose as Skelton walked through the role on stage. Silently.

To say that the mishap cast a shadow over the proceedings is an understatement: Britten’s taut, tortured opera pins its success on the central character of Grimes, a man who is both perpetuator of his own misfortunes and the victim of mob rule. (Quite why the understudy wasn’t prepared to step in and perform – a major oversight – isn’t clear). Yet it is a testament to the cast and direction that Thursday’s show remained impactful, even if it never reached the dizzying heights of earlier performances.

First premiering just weeks after the end of the second world war, Britten’s opera, with a libretto by Montagu Slater and inspired by George Crabbe’s collection of poems the Borough, is set in a Suffolk fishing village.

The action revolves around a fisherman, Peter Grimes, an outsider in the gossipy, claustrophobic community. He is taken to court for the death of his young apprentice but the tragedy is deemed an accident. The death of a second boy under his care and tutelage, however, incites vigilantes to enact their own form of justice.

The cast used just a handful of props during Thursday’s performance. Photograph: Stephanie Do Rozario

While the presence of water is felt continually in the surge of the music, the atmosphere is one of suffocation and fear rather than of freedom. The ferocity of nature, too, and the fragility of the fisherman’s fortunes, is never forgotten. As Britten wrote at the time: “My life as a child was coloured by the fierce storms that sometimes drove ships on to our coast and ate away whole stretches of the neighbouring cliffs. In writing Peter Grimes, I wanted to express my awareness of the perpetual struggle of men and women whose livelihood depends on the sea.”

Peter Grimes hadn’t been performed in Brisbane for 60 years. For Berthold to secure this production, and especially the world-renowned Skelton, for a two-night run was a coup – which made the events of opening night all the more smarting.

Still, Queensland Symphony Orchestra – who sat magnificent on centre stage with the performers acting around them, using just a handful of props – managed to conjure up the swells and sighs of the sea under the acclaimed Scottish conductor Rory Macdonald. Opera Queensland’s chorus, dressed in grey hoodies and beanies, came into their own in the mob scene, when a crowd clutching burning torches and an effigy of Grimes comes to hunt him down. Their savage, animalistic cries were chilling.

The cast rallied after lead singer Stuart Skelton fell ill on Thursday. Photograph: Stephanie Do Rozario

The soprano Sally Matthews was sympathetic as the prim, proper teacher Ellen, who tries to help Grimes, only to make things worse; the baritone Mark Stone provided stoic strength as Grimes’s friend Captain Balstrode, a voice of reason in the madness. Meanwhile, the Australian performers Jacqueline Dark, as the buxom and buttoned-up busybody Mrs Sedley, and Hayley Sugars, as the no-nonsense publican “Auntie”, were riveting to watch. Each character is complex: there is no good or evil here, just human imperfections in full glare.

The so-called “semi-staging” – meaning that there is almost no set, aside from a thick rope, used to great effect, and the outline of a tin hut that stands in as Grimes’s home – allows the audience to fill in the blanks. The skill of a cast that can not only sing but act too took us effortlessly from the howls of a storm to the steep cliffs.

In reviews in the UK, Skelton has been applauded for not only his voice but his nuance in the role. A great bear of the man – dressed, like the rest of the cast, in rough-and-ready contemporary clothes (in his case overalls and a grubby jumper) – he certainly has physical presence. Grimes, after all, is careless and cruel with his young wards, unhinged and a bully, even if he does not deserve his brutal end.

On Thursday night Skelton was felled, we learnt later, by severe pollen allergies. With appropriate treatment he will as planned be able to perform on Saturday. In 2017 the Times of London gushed: “There is beauty and violence in the Australian tenor’s voice,” which seemed “to breathe the air of faraway planets”. Let’s hope the audience gets to hear it.

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