NEWS •

Singing in the rain: foxes, ferrets and a flood opera

Young voices set to join performances of Britten’s flood opera at Hull and Grimsby Minsters

Can we use opera to engage children with flooding? Professor Stewart Mottram, who leads the AHRC Noah to Now project looking at literature and flooding along England’s East Coast, reflects with Dr Edward Brookes and Lisa J. Coates on their experience working with primary schools in Hull and Grimsby to perform Benjamin Britten’s opera, Noyes Fludde.

We are standing in the main hall of a primary school, watching a class of Year 5 children rehearse scenes from Benjamin Britten’s flood opera, Noyes Fludde. The hall is filled with the sound of barking, braying, and cawing, while children walk past on all fours pretending to be pigs, panthers, foxes, and ferrets.

In this rehearsal, children have been asked to choose which animal they would like to perform on stage; it is proving a difficult decision. Britten lists 35 possible animals in his score.

With its focus on flooding, our production is also designed to engage schools with the heightened risks flooding poses to Humber communities like Hull and Grimsby, using opera to raise awareness of flooding in creative ways.

Professor Stewart Mottram

The children are due to play the animals in Noah’s ark in one of two performances of Britten’s opera that we are producing, in partnership with Hull Music Service, at Hull and Grimsby Minsters in March 2025. They will not be performing alone. Theirs is one of six classes from primary schools across Hull and Grimsby who will be taking part in the performances, with schools coming together to create a 90-strong children’s choir at each venue.

Opera brings many benefits to children, encouraging teamwork, building confidence and self-esteem, and contributing to curriculum goals in music, art, and physical education. But with its focus on flooding, our production of Britten’s Noyes Fludde is also designed to engage schools with the heightened risks flooding poses to Humber communities like Hull and Grimsby, using opera to raise awareness of flooding in creative ways.

Rehearsals for Noye's Fludde by Benjamin Britten at Orford Church, Aldeburgh Festival, July 1961. Credit: Chroma Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

All schools in England now have a responsibility to include sustainability and climate change topics within their curriculum. But the current guidance is for schools to focus their climate and sustainability provision on STEM subjects like geography, technology, and the sciences. How might we also harness the creative power of the arts and humanities to raise awareness about topics like flooding in schools?

Flood stories like the story retold in Britten’s Noyes Fludde are known to many cultures and faith communities around the world. The Noah figure who gathers animals in a boat to survive a global flood also appears, for example, in the 4000-year-old Assyrian epic of Gilgamesh, and in the Native American (Cree) myth of Wisagatcak and the Great Beaver. These are stories of environmental disaster but also of survival, adaptation, and mitigation. Engaging children with such stories in school can therefore prompt reflection on how humans have lived with flooding in the past, and on the risk management lessons we can learn from these stories for today. Our work with primary schools is therefore combining opera rehearsals with workshops designed to raise awareness of the wisdom contained in flood stories from around the world.

Britten’s Noyes Fludde tells a universal story, but it is also an opera shaped by the history of living with flood risk along England’s East Coast, a low-lying coastline long vulnerable to flooding from North Sea storms. First performed in 1958, Noyes Fludde was written in the shadow of the 1953 North Sea Flood, when a surge tide overwhelmed sea defences along Scotland and England’s East Coast in the early hours of 1 February 1953, tragically claiming over 300 lives in the UK alone. On that night, seawater swept into hundreds of houses in Britten’s hometown of Aldeburgh, Suffolk, and Britten’s seafront villa was one of those affected. ‘Luckily the flood water stopped at the ground floor’, a columnist in The Daily Herald reported on 1 June 1953. ‘His study is upstairs. He went on working’.

A breach at Erith after the North Sea flood of 1953.

Noyes Fludde also looks back, from the perspective of 1953, on over six centuries of East Coast flooding, for the libretto of Britten’s opera is in fact based on the late medieval play, ‘Noyes Fludde’, one of several English Noah plays to survive from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Noah plays were often performed in towns and cities in late medieval England and were particularly popular in East Coast communities including Hull, where a Noah play was performed between 1461-1531 by Hull's Trinity House guild – the only surviving evidence of late medieval dramatic activity in this town.

How might we harness the creative power of the arts and humanities to raise awareness about topics like flooding in schools?

The Noah to Now project traces these ‘water marks’ that flooding leaves on East Coast literature across time, moving from late medieval plays and poems to today’s eco-poetry and climate fiction. The project is interested in past literature and past floods, but its performance of Britten’s Noyes Fludde also makes clear the continued relevance of these flood stories to the East Coast communities with whom we work. These are communities with experiences and memories of recent flooding, from the flooding that affected parts of Lincolnshire in January 2025, to the devastating 2007 floods in Hull, which saw over 10,000 homes damaged by flood water.

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, our work is therefore shining an important light on the role the arts and humanities can play in educating and engaging schools and wider communities with the topic of flooding.  The project is working with five primary schools across Hull and North-East Lincolnshire: Laceby Acres Academy (Grimsby), Mersey Primary Academy (Hull), Pilgrim Academy (Immingham), Stepney Primary School (Hull), and Wybers Wood Academy (Grimsby).

Benjamin Britten’s Noyes Fludde will be performed at Grimsby Minster on 24 March 2025, and at Hull Minster on 26 March 2025. Both performances are ticketed, but free to attend. To reserve tickets, please visit our separate Eventbrite pages for the Grimsby Minster and Hull Minster performances.

Stewart Mottram is Professor of Literature and Environment at the University of Hull and Project Lead for the Arts and Humanities Research Council project, ‘From Noah to Now: A Cultural History of Flooding in English Coastal and Estuary Communities’ (AH/Y004779/1).

Edward Brookes is a Research Fellow at the University of Hull with research specialisms in cultural geography, arts engagement and the environmental humanities. This includes working as part of the research team for the AHRC-funded ‘From Noah to Now’ and ‘Risky Cities’ projects.

Lisa J Coates is a freelance singer, writer and theatre maker, and Creative Director for 'From Noah to Now', producing and directing Britten’s Noye's Fludde.

Last updated

Top