Mr Swallow

Swallow opens the opera holding every office that matters — lawyer, Mayor, Coroner — and he opens it sitting in judgment. The inquest into a dead apprentice is the Borough examining itself and refusing to look. I play him as procedure made flesh: a man who mistakes the form of justice for the fact of it.

The challenge is weight without warmth. Britten gives Swallow clipped, declamatory lines over a courtroom that never quite settles — the voice has to carry authority while the music keeps pulling the ground out from under it. Later he turns to flirt with the tavern girls, and the same gravity curdles into something smaller. The trick is to let both live in one timbre.

He is the Borough's conscience and its convenience at once. Sung straight, he condemns himself.