Of all the many grisly killers who have made fine operatic heroes, few are as difficult to explain and as hard to like as Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. His anguished soul will be revived in a new Metropolitan Opera production by the British director John Doyle on February 28.

The brooding fisherman Grimes is no mere cold-blooded killer, nor a gleeful assassin. He is a serial physical abuser of adolescent boys who, in the opera’s opening scene, is the focus of a public inquiry into the death of a young seagoing apprentice.

The tight community cannot prove for certain that Grimes is culpable in the boy’s death, and the people around him are grudgingly obliged to give him the benefit of the doubt — on condition he does not employ another child. When Grimes recruits a second boy from the workhouse to help him on his arduous fishing trips in the North Sea, the suspicious townspeople — and the audience — are filled with foreboding.

Mr. Doyle, making his Met debut, is fully aware of the problems in trying to present, as Britten intended, the grim Grimes as a romantic hero. Britten, living in California as Britain went to war against Hitler in 1939, chose the subject after reading an article by E. M. Forster on the 19th-century poet George Crabbe’s epic verse “The Borough,” set in the English fishing village of Aldeburgh, Suffolk.

The poem provoked in Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, a yearning to return to his home county of Suffolk. The work echoed his sense of being hounded by British public opinion over his absence during wartime, his status as a conscientious objector, and his homosexuality.

Mr. Doyle recognizes Britten’s source of anguish: “Growing up in the Highlands of Scotland, where the presence of the sea is always evident, and living now in the seaside town of Hastings, with its small community and its fishermen, I can understand the pressures on Grimes to conform,” he said. “Most of my references come from Hastings. Both there and at Aldeburgh the boats are dragged up onto the shore. Both towns have just one or two main streets.”

The Met poster shows tenor Anthony Dean Griffey, as Grimes, against the tall dark wooden fishing net huts on the shingle beach in Hastings. Mr. Doyle employs a towering wall of huts as the key motif in his sets. “As the world closes in on him, so the walls pen him in with paranoia, cornering him in his claustrophobic hut,” he said.

Britten uses the chorus to hound the wayward outsider. “The chorus of townspeople is immensely important as they become a character almost as important as Grimes himself,” Mr. Doyle said. “They are like black crows on the beach and move in unison like shoals of fish.”

He admits to being impressed by the sheer size of the Met’s chorus. “I thought, my God, the whole of Aldeburgh is on the stage.”

The near hermit Grimes is pitted against the scalding wrath of the mob. He is a rare character in fiction, shunned, brutish, callous, yet made heroic by virtue of his free spirit and independence. Britten does not shy away from the awkward and disagreeable Grimes, and he closely identified with such a noble, tragic outcast. It is no coincidence that the burghers of Aldeburgh, where Britten settled with Pears — who first sang the role of Grimes — have to this day failed adequately to celebrate the renowned composer in their midst. The local prejudice against Britten persists, even though the annual music festival he founded, which continues more than three decades after his death in 1976, has brought new jobs and cash flow to the town.

Mr. Doyle, a British stage director whose Tony-winning direction of Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” on Broadway commended him to the Met general manager Peter Gelb, finds it hard to name a literary hero as cold and as uncongenial as Grimes; perhaps Shakespeare’s Richard III is closest. Which makes it difficult to encourage the audience to be compassionate.

“He is a complex character,” Mr. Doyle said. “He can bleed. He can get angry. He needs to love. He needs to control. He’s branded. He’s an artist. He has an imagination beyond the ordinary.” Mr. Doyle imagines that, although the story is based on the English coast, Americans will recognize the same constrictive attitudes, the same small-town hypocrisy. “There is something in Grimes that will remind people of Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, in ‘Death of a Salesman,’ or John Proctor, in ‘The Crucible,’ though the opera was written many years before. They will see Salem in Aldeburgh.”

“Peter Grimes” reopened Sadler’s Wells, London, in June 1945, just a month after VE Day. Despite its difficult themes and its moral ambiguity, and, notwithstanding its haunting, uncompromising score, it immediately became a popular and critical international success, marking Britten as England’s most significant opera composer in three centuries. “Grimes” quickly crossed the Atlantic and was conducted by Leonard Bernstein at its American premiere at Tanglewood in the summer of 1946. Forty-four years later, suffering from a debilitating lung condition, Bernstein conducted “Four Sea Interludes” from “Peter Grimes”‘ alongside Beethoven’s Seventh at Tanglewood. The poignant, moving, lyrical music was the last he conducted in what was to be his final concert.