Randal Turner to make role debut as Ned Keene

Randal Turner

It's just been announced that Randal Turner will be replacing Christoph Plessers as Ned Keene in Britten's Peter Grimes at the Theater Koblenz. This will be his role debut and his third Benjamin Britten character, having previously performed Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Pisa and Mr. Redburn in Billy Budd in Torino.

Ned Keene is an apothecary and quack who supplies the old widow Mrs Sedley with her pills. He also finds a new apprentice for Grimes after the last one mysteriously disappeared at sea. To cause a distraction and thus avoid an unpleasant scene in the Boar, he leads the crowd in the round of the sea shantly "Old Joe has gone fishing." The role was created by Edmund Donlevy in 1945 at Sadler's Wells in London.

Performances run from May 30 to July 3. He'll be joined in the cast by Ray M. Wade, Jr. as Peter Grimes, Aurea Marston as Ellen Orford and Jongmin Lim as Swallow. Additional cast and ticket information is available online.

There are a number of performances of Peter Grimes throughout Europe this year, including in Ulm, Vienna, Saarbrucken, Reykjavik, Mönchengladbach, Krefeld and Berlin.