Peter Grimes is one of the rare examples of original student writing staged as a main show at the ADC, written and directed by Joseph Winters. Based on a poem by George Crabbe and made famous by a Benjamin Britten opera, the story focusses on an isolated fishing community. A young boy dies at sea and the community blame Peter Grimes: sentenced to isolation, gossip and paranoia are unleashed with disastrous consequences.

I wasn’t sure about large parts of the script. There was a lot of carefully crafted dialogue that articulated complex emotion and difficult tensions beautifully. However, the pacing was slow and erratic; important developments appeared from nowhere and key moments were inarticulate. Confusion persisted for me: I found myself uncertain about that which was meant to be certain - setting, date, pivotal details - but picking up on minor themes that were emphasised.

Louis Norris, as the eponymous lead, gave a strong performance: he was entirely unsympathetic, which seemed to be intentional, but this lead to a strange dynamic as there was nobody to root for. Nonetheless, his descent into madness was performed with zeal. In fact, the final, long scene - mostly a dialogue between Peter and his fiancé, Mary - was wonderful, with moments of intense drama and many of the play’s best, most poetic lines, including a particularly touching monologue on sight.

Em Miles’s Mary was equally accomplished but similarly peculiar: her grief in the later scenes was wonderful but her blindness, which was mentioned repeatedly throughout the play, only manifested itself at the end. Throughout the first half, she moved around and saw detail with ease; she generally felt too young, her relationship with John (Tom Ingham) was more like sister and brother. Ingham was mostly good too, with subtly repressed Freudian feelings, but I had no idea how old he was: he was labelled a ‘boy’ on multiple occasions but could have been anywhere between eight and eighteen (it was later mentioned he was fifteen).

The direction fluctuated between creatively subtle and deeply flawed: some scenes felt stilted and overtly amateur; choreographed movements of the chorus, with pulsating movement and flailing arms, were annoying and often detracted from the intensity of the central drama. For the writer to double-up as the director seemed overly ambitious: the voice of a director to act as a filter for the script could have payed dividends. There were moments of genius, though, such as the appearance of a puppet cat or the intricate staging of a simple slap.

However, it has to be said, this is one of the most beautiful productions I’ve ever seen on the ADC stage. This in itself made up for many of the shortcomings. The set was astonishingly professional: Peter’s hut was beautifully built and used in a dynamic way. The lack of flexibility was occasionally an issue, though: for a brief moment his hut became his boat but there was no suggestion of this aside from the speech. The lighting and sound design were atmospheric and generally wonderful; I was enchanted on many occasions by the combination of spotlights and smoke, impressionistic projections of purple, green and orange lights. Live music added a certain je ne sais quoi: harp, whistle and fiddle were played onstage lending an immediacy that the rolling waves and foghorn recordings couldn’t provide. Em Miles’ vocals were beautiful and affective, more evocative than much of the surrounding dialogue.

This production had moments of genius but needs a lot of polishing. It felt like it was aspiring to the epic scale of a Miller play translated to an English seaside community: themes of community, paranoia and family dominated, but the tragic climax was lacking: I’m still not sure what the moral of the story was. Overall, it felt like it was a story better suited to an opera. It’s worth seeing, though, to make up your own mind about this ambitious and beautiful show.