David Alden’s new production of Peter Grimes for English National Opera is a great theatrical experience. So much so as to raise in an acute form what I regard as “the Britten opera problem” — why, after hearing a score repeat with the most dazzling effects, here including one of the greatest orchestral storm scenes ever written and such mainstays of traditional opera as a lovers’ scene with a church service in the background, are we not truly moved — other than to admiration?

Alas, the central character simply doesn’t work. In George Crabbe’s powerful early 19th-century poem, Grimes is a fisherman who — brutalised by poverty and loneliness — has become a sadist who mistreats and finally murders his apprentices. Britten, his librettist Montagu Slater and Grimes’s first interpreter, Peter Pears, have censored this down to a naif, visionary outsider whom the villagers resent primarily for being “different”. The uncertainty as to his identity is heightened by the constant repetition of his name, first by the villagers (with increasing menace), then, in the confusion of madness, by Grimes himself in the final scene.

Since Grimes’s own utterances vary constantly from the aggressive/practical (“I’ll fish the sea dry”) to the lyrical/visionary (“What harbour shelters peace?”), impersonations of him have inevitably swung between the extremes of Peter Pears (lyrical) and Jon Vicars, whom I remember triumphing at Covent Garden with a violent Grimes of whom one could believe the worst. Here, Stuart Skelton acted a bemused, but hardly incipiently violent character, while displaying a voice in the lyric passages which left Pears far behind. His exquisite “Now the Great Bear and Pleiades” made one realise why he is one of the most sought-after Lohengrins in the world today.

As Grimes’s only friends, Amanda Roocroft’s Ellen and Gerald Finley’s Captain Balstrode, both superbly sung, appeared not only more sympathetic, but much more real. Alden treated the minor characters with a degree of caricature, futile figures against the background of sea and storm, but Ellen’s love and compassion for Grimes emerged triumphant in the “Embroidery” aria.

Best of all was Alden’s brilliant handling of the chorus. He is clearly as saturated in the work of previous great directors (including film directors) as Britten was in previous “big” opera (including Verdi and Wagner). In a flash the simple people of the Borough can become a crowd of infinite menace; in act two like the invading army in Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, here holding prayer-books aloft; in act three almost like the automata human-beings of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as the dancers imperceptibly turn into a mob baying for blood (the prayer-books replaced — sinister touch — by Union Jacks).

The designer Paul Steinberg sets all this in a world in which exquisite seascapes balance the anguishing claustrophobia of the interiors — the moot hall, the pub and Grimes’s hut.

The ENO’s music director, Edward Gardner conducted a completely assured performance, with orchestral playing like the surging of the ever-present sea, magnificent alike in calm and storm.