Richard Morrison at the Grand Theatre, Leeds [Times Online, 30 October 2006]

No shingle, boats, pub or borough. Just one vast fishing net, hoisted like a mysterious communal totem in one of many darkly symbolic moments that punctuate Phyllida Lloyd’s staging of Britten’s masterpiece. Opera North’s new production must be one of the starkest yet conceived. The very people seem like flotsam and jetsam, adrift in a black sea. Even the pub singsong resembles a bunch of castaways huddled in a makeshift refuge.