the times | Tuesday March 15 2022 9
arts
‘different’ character. It’s
just that he is different
enough.”
Clayton is affable
company; it would be far harder work
to have a beer with Peter Grimes than
with the man sitting in a bare room in
the Royal Opera House’s press
department. Still, he admits he likes
his tortured characters. Of his turn in
the title role of Brett Dean’s 2017
Hamlet at Glyndebourne — it comes
to the Met this spring, after the
London run of Grimes — Richard
Morrison said: “Forget Cumberbatch.
Forget even Gielgud. I haven’t seen a
more physically vivid, emotionally
affecting or psychologically astute
portrayal of the Prince of Denmark.”
Clayton was barely off stage in that
show. “Grimes will feel easy compared
to Hamlet, which has about three
times more music.”
Is there a kind of a catharsis to theseIs there a danger of talking down to a
community, of making reductive
assumptions? “There is and that’s why
I don’t pass too much comment on it,”
Clayton replies. The overall idea, he
suggests, is more about replicating
those “societal issues” that fire the
hatred and suspicion of The Borough
— “people trying to make ends meet
in a place that isn’t looking after them”.
The “is he or isn’t he” question
about Grimes is whether the man is
suffering a kind of mental illness.
Warner and Clayton chewed that one
over. “We talked about him being a
drunk, we talked about him being
neurodivergent, or having a tic, or
anything like that. And I don’t think
that’s the case.” Clayton believes
instead that when the curtain goes up
Grimes has already experienced a
completely relatable “severe psychotic
break” from witnessing the death of
his first apprentice. “He’s not a very‘T
he beard got the
gig before I did,”
says Allan Clayton
of how he won the
biggest role of his
career. It certainly
looks like a
fisherman’s facial
hair — well beyond manscaped,
hipster standard — and Clayton is
immediately plausible as the burly
antihero of Benjamin Britten’s 1945
masterpiece, Peter Grimes. With the
41-year-old tenor at the centre of an
ensemble featuring three knights of
the realm — Bryn Terfel as Balstrode,
John Tomlinson as Swallow and Mark
Elder conducting — Grimes is back at
the Royal Opera House in a new
production by Deborah Warner this
week. The show will also be streamed
in April.
Clayton is now deep into the role,
coveted by any British tenor worth
their salt. The Worcestershire-raised
singer sang his first professional
Grimes in Warner’s staging in Madrid
in spring 2021 — a triumph of anti-
Covid logistics by the Teatro Real,
which spent more than 1 million euros
on a new ventilation system and
toilets, as well as 250,000 euros on
Covid tests, just to open its doors. The
mostly British cast were also crash-test
dummies for the new hurdles imposed
by the Brexit agreement.
All of which was stressful, Clayton
says. But with travel restrictions being
what they were at the time, the sort-of
silver lining was that the British music
world had to stay away — “no one
could go and see it, which was kind of
perfect”. And now, road-tested,
Clayton is taking his Peter Grimes on
something close to a world tour. From
London the production will go to
Paris and Rome, then Clayton will
wave the flag for Grimes at New York’s
Metropolitan Opera.
These are all far grander affairs than
Clayton’s “first” Grimes — a student
effort that Clayton and some other
University of Cambridge students put
on themselves some 17 years ago. “A
lot of the academics stayed away from
it, because they didn’t think we should
be doing it. They got quite sniffy about
it.” He may serve cold-brewed revenge.
“One of them just emailed me asking
for a ticket to the dress rehearsal. I’m
like, ‘Oh, so you want to come and see
it now.. .’ ” Clayton was, however, in
the luxurious position of being able to
be coached through the role by Philip
Langridge, a renowned Grimes
himself. Those sessions informed
everything he does today, he says. “He
challenged you on each word that you
sang. Not only the way that you sang
it, but the intensity behind it, the
intention behind it.”
The Grimes created by Clayton and
Warner depicts part of England that
isn’t usually on the tourism posters.
Britten’s opera is set in “The Borough”,
usually aligned with Aldeburgh in
Suffolk, where Britten lived. Its
townspeople are a petty-minded lot
who viciously turn on the oddball
Grimes. In her contemporary staging
Warner has said she was inspired by a
town further down the North Sea
coast, Jaywick Sands in Essex, which
the UK government has classified as
England’s most deprived community.
“She showed us images and talked
about the way the town had been
portrayed in the media,” Clayton says.
“And she’s mixed in elements of what
you might call post-Brexit nationalism.
The ease with which people can
become quite aggressive quite quickly.”
roles? “No, I think I’d be thinner and
I’d drink less if it were cathartic,” he
replies. “It does take a toll. At the same
time it does come naturally.”
After the run of Hamlet at
Glyndebourne finished, Clayton says
he “had a bit of a crash”. His next
show was a postmodern take on The
Tempest directed by Katie Mitchell.
“It was all f***ing bleak — you know,
90 minutes of pure Mitchell-ism. It
was right off the back of Hamlet and
I’d had to move house because I’d split
up with my girlfriend.”
The day he was supposed to board a
flight for the production that came
next, Eugene Onegin in Frankfurt,
things came to a head. He had a panic
attack in the taxi to the airport and
couldn’t get on the flight. He cancelled
Onegin, took a six-week sabbatical
“and I started seeing a therapist — as I
have pretty much every week since
then”. As a result, he’s learnt to cut
himself some slack, professionally
speaking. “I don’t feel any more sorted
as a person, but it’s the way I approach
things, not trying to be on the front
foot the whole time.”
The loneliness of his profession gets
to him, he admits — a “boom-bust”
cycle as he sees it, of short-term
friendships made during short-lived
experiences in strange places. He is
honest about struggling with his
weight. “I drink too much, and that’s
where all my calories come from. You
know, you finish work, you have a
couple of pints, it’s nice. And you think
you’re rewarding yourself.” More
boom-bust. “Then you’re awake till
four in the morning and next day you
feel like dogshit.”
He certainly felt the crunch during
lockdown — he says he was close to
losing the house he rents in Lewes in
East Sussex and only scraped by
because his agent lent him some
money. He stresses that he is one of
the luckier ones, but is unhappy about
simply returning to the pre-pandemic
status quo — in particular the system
whereby singers are only paid per
performance. “All our contracts say
that you have to arrive word-perfect,
note-perfect. So that’s
months of preparation,
let alone six, seven weeks
of rehearsal.”
Yet it goes unpaid until
the first night. Discussing
this with the director
Barrie Kosky, he found out
that directors like him, by
contrast, get a third of
their fee on commission, a
third on day one of
rehearsals, and the final
chunk on the first night.
“So they have earned all of
their substantial fee —
substantially more than
any of the singers — before the singers
have started earning.”
His solution? “It might be a difficult
switch for opera houses, and they
might have to ask sponsors for some
money, but [let’s] say to everyone,
‘As a show of good faith, on the first
day of rehearsals, here is one
performance fee.’ ”
Clayton is at least being honest to
his own process. Rehearsals are where
he really feels the “work and the fun
and the invention”. But once the
production gets on stage, the job is
different — “to make the show live
each time”. It leaves him, especially
after Grimes, feeling “empty. Not just
physically but emotionally spent.” He
laughs. “And I think that on the nights
when the show goes well.”Allan Clayton as
Peter Grimes and
Saúl Esgueva as his
apprentice at Teatro
Real in MadridPanic attacks and
poor pay: the life
of an opera star
Peter Grimes is at the
Royal Opera House,
London WC2, from
Thu to March 31
and streamed from
April 8, roh.org.ukANDY PARSONS FOR THE TIMES; JAVIER DEL REALTenor Allan Clayton
talks to Neil Fisher
about the lasting effects
of the pandemic as
he sings Peter Grimes
at Covent Garden