Vision 4 mood board

Briefs description:

This has been and always will be inescapably a story about England. As the novelist E M Forster, who introduced the original poet to Britten in 1941, said: ‘to think of Crabbe is to think of England’. And as if to emphasise the resonance and sense of ownership the opera engendered in the British public, Peter Pears – Britten’s partner, who also premiered the role Peter Grimes – liked to tell the story of the bus conductor who, at the stop for Sadler's Wells theatre (where the opera was first performed), would call out: "Any more for Peter Grimes, the sadistic fisherman.” I want to explore what it says about this country and our society NOW, post-Covid and post-Brexit. Maybe Grimes himself is now England: the self-proclaimed outsider, the dreamer, the fantasist, the complicated, self-harming and sadistic victim of its own self-image. Or maybe it’s the other way around, and we are The Borough: old fashioned and suspicious, but bound by what is (in some places) felt to be a common set of rules. I’m after a bold, entertaining production that is as strikingly personal to us as a nation in 2022 as it was in 1945.