Deborah Orr: Jersey is an unwilling star in this drama Saturday, 1 March 2008
I doubt that there has ever been a performance of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes that has not found some sort of disturbing echo in the news of the day. But that didn't make it any more comfortable this week to watch Opera North's touring production of this demanding exploration of child abuse in a small and tight community.
Any failure to catch the contemporary resonance of the themes was hammered home with the sudden elevation to punning significance of John the apprentice's leitmotif jersey. Grimes kept his boys in a fisherman's hut, when they were not out at sea, and the townspeople conspired to know and to not know what happened in there. They shunned Grimes, and they talked of lynching, But they didn't stop further abuse, either through sympathetic intervention or harshly bombastic dissociation. In Jersey, the island, over these past few days, the exact themes of the opera have been playing out around the hidden darkness of a cellar. Concern about the exploitation of children has been with us for a long time, as is confirmed by the fact that Britten's libretto was taken from an 18th-century poem, "The Borough", by George Crabbe.
What became clear this week in the darkness of Sadler's Wells is that society is well used to greeting the issue with noisy and self-regarding hypocrisy as well. Such criticism as Britten's masterpiece ever receives tends to focus on the fact that we know little of the eponymous anti-hero's motives or even his actions – some productions, and some speculations, hint more at a sexual element than others. All we do know about Grimes is that he is violent, capricious, stubborn and self-pitying. But that is the point of the opera. This alone should be enough to prompt the community to protect children from him in the most practical way they can.
Advocating for the child ought to be far more important than either punishing or understanding the perpetrator. But it isn't. More easily grasped is the reason why John the apprentice is silent, while the previous apprentice is just a corpse from the past.
Abused children are not in a position to express their fear and their suffering, at the time, or sometimes, ever. In Jersey, at the moment, news reports claim that "significant finds" in the hidden cellars may provide real evidence of the stories survivors have told.
Their own testimony is not "real evidence", even when they are still around to give it.
Anyway, it all went on so long ago that neither they nor others are likely now to be saved.
The really significant entity in Britten's opera – the "star" if you will – is the community itself, as was communicated so powerfully in the choreography of Phyllida Lloyd's production.
Likewise, in Jersey, the victims of the alleged abuse, and the perpetrators too, are shadowy projections, while the focus of interest, and the main speaking parts, fall to and on the people of the island – what they knew, what they didn't know, what they covered up and what they could be excused for remaining in ignorance of.
In this unwelcome drama, the people of the island are the main player, unwilling as they may be.
The people of Aldeburgh, the village that presented Crabbe with the incident on which he based his poem, and also Britten's home, are deeply ambivalent about the way their town is portrayed in this great work.
In Aldeburgh, as in Jersey, there is a feeling of being singled out unfairly. It's a sad though understandable reaction, as unhelpful as the pathology of Grimes, which it echoes.
The desire to locate abuse of children somewhere else, in a hut, in a cellar, in a village, on an island, is just another way of creating the distance that allows such cruelty to thrive. The themes in Peter Grimes, and in Jersey, are unfortunately universal. The wish to particularise them, and keep them somehow at bay through geography, is part of the trouble.
Independent
