"Carmen". New Theatre

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website.

At the curtain call of Ellen Kent’s Carmen at the New Theatre, the cast, who hail from Kharkiv, unfurl a Ukrainian flag and sing their national anthem with passion and power. It’s a stirring climax, but unfortunately it’s also the best thing in the whole show. Passion and power are two qualities Carmen should exude from every sweat-drenched pore, but this production lacks both. It’s more bullfinch than bullfight.

Unlike plays, opera productions have a way of being resuscitated on a regular basis. The set is hauled out of storage, the stage directions are dusted off, and a new cast of singers is inserted into the ready-made musical mould. This Carmen has been on hard rotation since at least 2015, and it shows. Like photocopying the same image over and over again, after too many iterations you end up with a pale imitation of the original. Whatever spark it once had has blurred, faded and vanished.

Any director approaching Carmen in the modern age has a choice: (1) take the traditional route as originally conceived by Bizet in 1875, in which Carmen herself is a bewitching siren, luring innocent, upright young soldier Don Jose to his ruin. Or (2) take the progressive route, exploring the inner strength of Carmen and her refusal to conform to the male-dominated world into which she has been born. Ellen Kent has gone Route One. In this production ‘gypsies’ are seen as thieves and brigands, Carmen’s switching between lovers is fickle caprice, and the Spanish soldiers’ attempts to take the innocent Micaela ‘inside for a bit of fun’ in Act One are treated as harmless jollity. In all, it’s a thoughtlessly misogynistic approach, and it turns what can (in the right hands) be a wild and amoral bacchanale into a dated, saccharine morality tale couched in inadvertent machismo.

What it fails to see is that in Carmen’s world, sex is power, and it’s the only weapon she has. As Cristina Hoyos said in Carlos Saura’s 1983 flamenco version, ‘Your breasts must be like a bull’s horns, but soft.’

Technically, the production stumbles on several fronts. The orchestra, despite boasting at least thirty musicians, sounds thin and weak. In the overture the brass and woodwind were so out of sync with each other that it sounded like being passed by two ambulances with their sirens playing ‘Toreador’ (a fact which did not seem to concern conductor Vasyl Vasylenko, who barely moved his baton). Lisa Kadelnyk, as Carmen, did not so much hit the high notes as have a general stab at them. And the surtitles (vital when you have an opera performed in French with Ukrainian accents) were frankly appalling. They frequently disappeared altogether while the performers continued to discourse. Sometimes they put up the words for the wrong character. And the font they used was too big for the screen, meaning that parts of the letters were invisible, leading to characters seeming to say, ‘Take him to iail! To iail!’ or, at one point, ‘Do you know what you are saving?’ It was Martin Lewis meets Georges Bizet. 

Stylistically, the show depends heavily on its mock-Roman Seville setting. But the chorus who populate that supposedly sun-drenched plaza bring no life or energy to it. They slouch and shuffle around, and their occasional efforts at flamenco are half-hearted and unconvincing, like an ageing belly-dancer on a cruise ship. The cigarette girls emerge from their hours of red-hot labour clad, perplexingly, in perfect white dresses. And in the final act, the famous March of the Toreadors borders on being a comedy sketch, as the same four actors walk repeatedly past the adoring crowds, presumably running round the back of the stage at full speed before coming on again.

Ellen Kent’s Carmen goes on for four acts, taking over three hours. It would be much shorter, but that includes a total 45 minutes of interval. Technically there’s no need for so much interval time – the set never alters, and the costume changes take a minute at most. This may be cynical, but it makes one wonder if ATG Theatres are simply using their shows to sell as much alcohol and confectionery as possible. (And by the way, why do they have so many security staff with flak jackets and walkie-talkies all over the venue? They look like high-tech bouncers. This is an opera, not a nightclub.)

As Carmen sings, in one of the greatest hits in the operatic canon, “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle”. But for Ellen Kent’s production, this bird has flown.