‘W ho can turn skies back and begin again?” That’s the question the fisherman Peter Grimes asks the universe at the close of his brief aria in Act 1 of Britten’s opera – two and a half minutes of singular, breath-holding music, at the end of which the people around him all think he’s mad or drunk, but we the audience know he’s a man apart, who sees more clearly than any of them. For someone who runs his life by watching those skies, the words are as succinct as they are beautiful – and there’s a simplicity to the way Allan Clayton sings them that encapsulates the balance of directness and poetry in his Grimes, a role in which he currently has few rivals. Perhaps it also sums up Deborah Warner’s staging, updated to a present-day, left-behind English coastal town, which has an almost workaday realism that feels like an invitation to take everything literally, and yet has touches of the fantastical right from the start.…