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Matilda Sterby as Ellen in Peter Grimes at Gothenburg Opera (Photo: Cordula Treml)

When The Gothenburg Opera last produced Peter Grimes in 1998, it was in a staging by David Radok whose costumes and setting might have been those of George Crabbe’s Suffolk. You won’t see any sou’westers or quaint fishing boats in Netia Jones’s new production for the company. Instead, you see what you encounter on this theatre’s doorstep for most of the opera season: the heavy machinery of maritime industry, ominously silhouetted against grey-black skies.

Jones’s transplanting of Grimes to industrial Gothenburg, right-here-right-now, prompts plenteous questions concerning place. Never has this ever-prescient opera felt truer than in post-Brexit Britain, the new European heartland of reactionary scapegoating and isolationism. In a contemporary Sweden that still cleaves to the principle of collective responsibility for societal failure, the story is an awkward fit, however much audiences here can relate to heaving seas and the physical trials of the fishing industry.

That might cause motivational problems but it doesn’t negate the visual power of Jones’s stark, dark staging. It has echoes of Phyllida Lloyd’s 2006 production for Opera North - not quite the same intense focus, but more gritty beauty. In contrast to David Alden’s parade of horror-show characters at ENO, the Gothenburg Grimes is most chilling when ordinary and faceless. Those who aren’t dressed for fish processing are dressed from Primark. Ned Keene (finely sung by Hannes Öberg) arranges his next push on the smartphone he can barely drag his eyes away from.

Peter Grimes at Gothenburg Opera (Photo: Cordula Treml)

Grimes plays to Gothenburg’s strengths as an ensemble company, even if shortcomings here underline what a treacherously difficult piece this remains for non-natives. Women and supporting roles are best; a desperately moving Act II quartet holds the theatre in its hand, living by delicacy more than steel, spotlighting Jones’s deft feminist seam. Matilda Sterby makes a strong impression as an Ellen who needs Grimes even more than he needs her, and sings radiantly. Katarina Giotas is spot-on as Mrs Sedley and in the most idiomatic performance of all, Katarina Karnéus makes every word count as a stentorian Auntie, though there’s no hint of audience laughter at her one-liners, nor from those of any other character.

If that’s a sign of something lost in cultural translation, so are performances from male leads who tend to rattle-through the libretto. On paper Åke Zetterström should be the ideal Balstrode, but his voice is losing the authority that was once coupled to its deep humanity, and he fudges too much text. In the title role, Joachim Bäckström is heavily prompted in Act I and some words don’t appear exactly where they do in the score. He sings cleanly but can struggle to define the ninth-interval of ‘What harbour shelters peace?’ and lacks lyrical expanse until his final Act III monologue, when he opens up at last. 

Bäckström’s characterization is stalked by a parallel incertitude. Unable to look Ellen in the eye for the entire prologue, he appears to show us a cruel and unfeeling functionary rather than a visionary, poetic soul - a portrayal that needs more brutality or some sense of illness or neurodivergence to work dramatically. Jones’s film projections only muddy the waters. Among her own evocatively smudged and obscured footage of Gothenburg harbour, Västra Götaland and the North Sea - accompanying stage action as well as the interludes - we glimpse Grimes’s violence and unequivocally witness a boy drowning, suggestive of a third victim, past or future.

Yet this unobtrusive though saturating footage gives the production its consistently unsettling undercurrent and works hand-in-hand with conducting from Christoph Gedschold underpinned by a sense of the tide’s ceaseless motion, terrible and deep but with texture and drama for the interludes. Orchestral playing falters occasionally but scores high on atmosphere, and the chorus sings with body, potency and colossal impact in its repeated Act III bellowing of ‘Peter Grimes’ - downstage, eyeballing the audience as is the directorial fashion, gasping and moaning in the almost-silences that separate each exclamation. It is a moment as astonishing, horrific, terrifying and beautiful as this entire opera proves itself, more and more, with every passing year - even if a muted reception in Gothenburg suggests some remain unconvinced.

 Until 1 April www.opera.se