It is over half a century old, but Peter Grimes is an opera for our times. Its theme - a village vigilante campaign against a suspected child abuser - might be drawn from modern headlines rather than George Crabbe's 19th-century ballad, and Phyllida Lloyd's production taps into the hysterical fury of an operatic naming-and-shaming campaign.

There is no finer interpreter of Benjamin Britten's works than Lloyd. Her Gloriana and Albert Herring were landmark productions for Opera North, and here she unites the pageantry of the one with the parochialism of the other to produce what may be the perfect Peter Grimes.

Using a subtle mix of costumes to suggest any era from the 1940s to the present, Lloyd concocts a chilling series of stage pictures. It is as much as you can do to watch as the residents of the Borough rabidly tear an effigy of Grimes limb from limb. All it lacks is a phalanx of police officers to come and confiscate his hard drive.

Lloyd achieves these effects with incredible economy of means. There is almost nothing to Anthony Ward's set apart from a few duckboards and an enormous, suspended net that represents everything from the manhunt to the billowing seas, and visually echoes the theme of Ellen Orford's embroidery aria, sung here with heart-stopping pathos by Giselle Allen. The turbulent, fluid conducting of Richard Farnes reinforces the notion that the chief character of Peter Grimes is the sea, and the Opera North chorus is magnificent throughout.

Yet this is to take nothing away from a titanic central performance by Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts. A burly figure with a supple, lyrical voice, Lloyd-Roberts has a lightness of tone that suggests Grimes's tragedy is that he remains an undeveloped child within a brute of a body. His terrible pain is disturbingly expressed when he tenderly embraces his dead apprentice, then holds the broken figure high above his head like some sacrificial offering to the malevolent sea.

It is generally accepted that Peter Grimes is the greatest of British operas. On occasions like this, you find yourself wondering if it may be the greatest opera, period.

· On November 4, then touring. Box office: 0870 122 4362.