"Melly Still’s new production {Peter Grimes} brilliantly captures the tortured guilt, small-minded bitching and flash-points of volatility" The Guardian

"Grimes is of course one of the great choral operas; as in Mussorgsky the chorus is a living, breathing dramatis persona, not merely what Wagner memorably called “scenery that has learnt to march and sing.” Here Melly Still, instead of distributing them round the stage, giving them nets to fold, lines to bait, sails to mend, shamelessly lines them up, like a wall of protest and discontent – a pre-digital twittersphere – and has them sing their hearts out. It’s brilliant and frightening, and a lot too close to home. In general this is a production that lets the work speak, without clutter and with only the occasional intervention: the dead apprentice’s (or is it WNO's?) coffin dragged across the stage before the Prologue, his phantom appearance in Grimes’s hut, and again in the final scene, movingly, in the boat in which he died and that has hung like a sword of Damocles over the stage from the very beginning. Here and there dancing scene-shifters intrude, but discreetly, except in the pub scene, where they mastermind with the chorus a brilliant, Dali-esque manipulation of doors and windows blown by the gale. But the sea itself figures in Chiara Stephenson’s settings as sound and space, not water or waves. For the rest, the atmosphere is behavioural, which is more or less exactly what the opera is all about." Arts Desk

"Pub opera productions have their place, but if you want a full-blooded music-theatre experience — and Melly Still’s new staging certainly supplies that — you need the clout of a proper orchestra and chorus.
She updates the story to a callous, tacky 1980s community, and strips the stage of any comforting scenery. What remains is symbolic, surreal and stylised. An upended fishing boat is often suspended over the head of Nicky Spence’s Grimes, the alienated fisherman, like the sword of Damocles. As he sings his unhinged solo about the Great Bear and Pleiades, its hull suddenly twinkles with stars.
Later, during the storm, four taunting youths entangle him in the boat’s ropes — a metaphor, perhaps, for the way he can’t escape the consequences of his first apprentice’s death, or his own guilt. And fans of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner will relish the extraordinary moment when, as the frenzied chorus sets off to hunt Grimes, an albatross is ritually strangled.
This “Borough” has no buildings, just a peripatetic door frame. That bareness puts stark emphasis on those playing the town’s hypocrites, lechers, sex workers and creeps — and a seasoned cast duly supplies a freak parade that David Lynch might have applauded." The Times

"The totally committed staging is by Melly Still... it makes the best possible case for the piece!" Nicholas Kenyon, The Daily Telegraph

"Something very special is happening at Nevill Holt this year. Opening night of The Magic Flute was a triumph, setting a high standard for this year’s quite remarkable Festival. Director, Melly Still confirmed in her pre-concert talk there had been no cuts musically, she had been faithful to the literal text hoping for an excitingly nuanced production. This she certainly achieved! From that crisply played overture, the early use of the scrim-like strings falling from the ceiling (frequently serving to support the fluidity of the set) plus the encouraging debuts of young people on stage and backstage, this production is the reward for much hard work by the production team." Clive Peacock, Seen & Heard International

"A sustainable production, adhering to the baseline principles of the Theatre Green Book, the show presents in Ana Inés Jabares-Pita’s sparse sets a vision of a struggling, down-at-heel community, while Akhila Krishnan’s videos conjure a myriad of atmospheric seas and skies. Melly Still’s handling of the large chorus – on formidable form, incidentally – is unfailingly skilled." George Hall, The Stage

"They’re {Glyndebourne Chorus} superbly marshalled by Still, in a modern-dress staging that is strong on the dynamics of how individuals can be collectively transformed into a mob. Sets and costumes evoke a sinister world created from the detritus of the lives of others, where shadowy figures hover in the semi-darkness like the Fates of classical mythology, propelling the narrative remorselessly forward. By no means, I think, the neglected masterpiece that some have argued, but it’s hard to imagine it better done." Tim Ashley, The Guardian

"Where the performance won out was as a piece of drama. Director Melly Still and designer Ana Inés Jabares-Pita have created a coastal setting with a complex and inventive mixture of painted sets, video projections, nets, choreography of four dancers and a few carefully chosen props. It’s brilliantly atmospheric and by the middle of Act 2, I was completely caught up in the tense narrative." David Karlin, Bachtrack

"Melly Still’s staging, along with conducting of total conviction by Robin Ticciati, reveals not just a drama of powerful moral principles but a score of remarkable individuality and inspiration.... Still deploys the movements and gestures of the crowd to maximal effect, the handling of the ecstatic moments in Act 2 and the rising tension of Act 3 is superlative." Barry Millington, Evening Standard

"Glyndebourne has sprinkled some magic dust on the piece... its new production is theatrically and musically gripping. Melly Still champions the work imaginatively. Her staging evokes a religious- fundamentalist coastal community, their desperate lives as precarious as the flotsam strewn around a ramshackle jetty (dark brooding designs by Ana Inés Jabares-Pita).The villagers live off the cargo of the ships they deliberately wreck by extinguishing the beam from their lighthouse." Richard Morrison, The Times