Theatre / Carmen
Review: Carmen, Bristol Hippodrome
Setting Bizet’s classic in 1970’s Brazil as director Jo Davies has done is an artistic direction that really works – it turns out Carmen wears a boiler suit and pumps just as well as multilayered petticoats. It’s Julia Mintzer’s UK and WNO debut in the role and she brings a welcome Latino warmth to Leslie Travers’ dusty urban set.
This stalwart of the operatic canon is no stranger to reinvention (Hip Hopera anyone?) but with this production Davies has updated the work without ripping out its foundations. With basically unchanged libretto, characters, plot and music, the original, brilliant DNA that so shocked 19th-century Parisians with its explicitness is the same, and the unfussy stage design leaves us free to focus more on characters than scene and costume.
There’s not a lot that hasn’t been said about Carmen which is possibly why Clair Rowden’s programme note saying that this is a production ‘for the #MeToo generation’ doesn’t quite land. It feels clickbaity and kind of misses the point – we forget that art doesn’t always have to say something.
is needed now More than ever
The inequalities and injustices in Bizet’s plot are obvious and exaggerated, as is always the way with tragic opera, and therefore need no further explanation. It’s true that the increasing majority of grey-headed audience members at classical and operatic performances is concerning, but Rowden’s clumsy attempt at drawing in millennials comes across as patronising.
Surely art, if good, is always important, and doesn’t need a culturally relevant sticker slapped on it to make it more appealing for a younger audience.
Leslie Travers’ urban set design. Photo: Welsh National Opera
You’d be hard-pressed to find someone, well-versed in opera or not, who wouldn’t enjoy this production – the choruses, particularly the cigarette girls, are rousing, the solos expertly delivered and the dancing spectacular.
Giorgio Caoduro’s Escamilo sings and walks with fabulous braggodocio and is performative in his masculinity like Carmen is in her femininity. We know from his first swaggering entrance that he is a far better match for her than the shambling Don José. Erin Pritchard’s (Micaëla) pure tone is lovely alongside Peter Auty’s (Don José) tenor in Parle-moi de ma mère and shines during solo aria C’est les contrabandiers le refuge ordinaire.
At the end of act one, Carmen is tied up in ropes following a bit of hammy stage fighting, and promptly seduces her way out of the situation, which is supposedly the type of scene that provokes musicologists to call Carmen’s femininity ‘problematic’.
Julia Mintzer as Carmen. Photo: Welsh National Opera
But saying that Carmen is somehow anti-feminist for using her feminine wiles instead of intellect to escape a predicament is reductive and ignores Bizet’s original intent for the character. Rather than being taken advantage of, as is the case with other dramatic female underdogs like Les Misérables’ Fantine, Carmen is a force to be reckoned with and is always in control of her situation.
It’s only towards the end you start to worry for her safety, when her lamenting duet with Don José stops being beautiful in its yearning and turns dangerously possessive.
Through effective lighting the stage is now neither a sunbaked courtyard nor a rowdy night-time bar, but a darkly dramatic setting for Carmen’s demise, her punishment for desiring not to be desired by one particular man. This is an operatic tragedy of grand proportions which WNO delivers with aplomb.
Main image: Welsh National Opera
Read more: Review: Yonaka, SWX
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