From around the world: Berlin.(International ... fine performances in Peter Grimes are hampered by poor set design and production)(Opera Review)

If someone of limited abilities and a demonic sense of humor set out to make a parody of all that's awful about German Regietheater, he might come up with something like Katja Czellnik's recent production of Peter Grimes for Berlin's Komische Oper. But Czellnik must honestly have thought that what she had staged was a fitting way to present Britten's masterpiece to an audience largely unfamiliar with it--which makes her production all the more worrying.

The problems began with Vera Bonsen's hideous set. Here was no village, no sea, no different times of day, no sign of a boat. Instead, in abundance, there were doormats. Perhaps Bonsen had recently read The Hobbit, or confused George Crabbe's Borough with a burrow. In any case all the action took place in a hole in the ground, its surfaces papered with doormats. Doormats covered the curving walls and ceiling, doormats littered the floor, cat-flap-style doormats formed entrance and exit spaces, doormats provided the chorus with its main form of action (you guessed it: footwiping). A tubular artery lined with doormats at the back of the stage enabled Grimes himself to slide into the action, trailing a parachute.

Czellnik had understood that Peter Grimes is a piece about an outsider caught in a conservative society, but she took that as her departure point for something mindlessly self-referential, devoid of other common ground with Britten's ...