Phyllida Lloyd's production of Peter Grimes for Opera North was greeted with universal acclaim on its first outing in 2006. Having managed to miss it during that famous opening run, however, I confess to having reservations about it now that it is on its first revival.

Much of it is, of course, formidable. Lloyd is wonderfully acute in her examination of how a hypocritical society can turn violently on an outsider who has come to represent elements within itself that it would prefer to suppress. Grimes's ill-treatment of his Apprentice is placed in the context of a culture in which children are exposed to, and adopt the attitudes of, the adults around them: the Apprentice's bullying by his playmates prefaces the later formation of the adult lynch mob that will hunt Grimes down.

Yet, in deciding to stage the interludes, Lloyd occasionally loses her certainty of touch. The storm brings social conflict, music and metaphysics into superb alignment, with Grimes himself outlined against the louring sky as fisher-folk struggle to secure flapping nets and hell erupts in the pit. Her staging of the passacaglia, however - treated as a flashback to happier times, when Ellen and Grimes were overseeing the building of the latter's hut - grates with Britten's score.

Musically, much of it is terrific, though Giselle Allen (Ellen) was not at her best on opening night. Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts' Grimes is one of the finest of recent years - a man with the imagination of a poet in the body of a brutal, unthinking giant. Richard Farnes's conducting is powerfully expressionistic, while a veritable who's who of British operatic talent form the citizens of the borough, every one of them characterised with exceptional vividness.

· Until January 25. Box office: 0844 848 2720. Then touring.