Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten, English National Opera, The Coliseum, London WC2. 4****: Clare Colvin.

Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten, English National Opera, The Coliseum, London WC2

4****: Clare Colvin.

At the start of the year it looked as if the English National Opera was to be the sacrificial victim of the Arts Council axe, with the prospect of losing its Coliseum base and its grant. Fortunately a sustained campaign ensured another year’s residence for the company. The opening night last week of David Alden’s awarding-winning staging of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes , back for the first time since 2014, provided a resounding reply to artistic bureaucracy, judging from the audience’s cheers at the end.

The tale of the isolated fisherman who attracts the enmity of the townspeople of a remote fishing village is based on the Suffolk poet George Crabbe’s The Borough, though Britten credited the deaths of Grimes’s two apprentices as accidental rather than due to deliberate brutality. In Alden’s staging the people who accuse Grimes are, if anything, madder than the outcast fisherman.

The scenes in Paul Steinberg’s stripped down setting add a nightmarish quality to the characters. The two young ‘nieces’ of Christine Rice’s Auntie, landlady of ‘The Boar,’ tie themselves to each other by wearing one coat, resembling a pair of jiggling Siamese twins. Clive Bailey’s self-important lawyer Swallow abuses the girls and prances drunkenly with trousers at half mast at the Moot Hall dance. Alex Otterburn’s sleazy quack Ned Keene meanwhile torments the opium-addicted Mrs Sedley (Anne-Marie Owens) whose accusations of murder set off the man-hunt to Grimes’s cabin. The music emphasises the threatening environment that emanates from the land and its inhabitants - the chanting of the catechism at the church service especially sounds a sinister note.

Central to the opera is the relationship between Grimes - a magnificent performance here from Welsh tenor Gwyn Hughes Jones - and Elizabeth Llewellyn’s widowed schoolmistress Ellen Orford, whose position in the village is jeopardised when she intervenes to bring another apprentice for Peter, imagining he will respond to her calming influence. Instead, Grimes is antagonised and hits back physically, thus sealing his fate as he is deserted even by Simon Bailey’s sea captain Bulstrode with the chilling command in the final scene on the beach to take his boat out to sea and sink it.

The orchestra of the English National Opera, under conductor Martin Brabbins, is in cracking form and ENO’s Chorus, likewise, in their impressive sound. Looking at the huge on-stage presence, one wonders that someone in an office had thought they were all dispensable. Let’s hope, in the hackneyed phrase applied in cases of bureaucratic misadventure, that “lessons have been learnt.”

Till 11 October

Conductor Martyn Brabbins; Director David Alden; Set designer Paul Steinberg; Costume designer Brigitte Reiffenstuel; Lighting designer Adam Silverman; Lighting revived by Gary James; Movement director Maxine Braham; Assistant conductor Mark Biggins; Production pictures ?