Songs lift a heavy-handed drama
La Tragédie de Carmen Wilton’s Music Hall, London E1
Some 35 years ago, director Peter Brook, with composer Marius Constant and writer Jean-claude Carrière, distilled Bizet’s opera into an 80-minute piece of lean and unadorned musical drama. Tailored to fit the atmosphere and dimensions of Brook’s intimate Parisian theatre, the Bouffes du Nord, it used a chamber orchestra, and the cast of four was made up of actors who could sing rather than singers who could act.
Brook’s purpose was to eliminate the clichés: he aimed to restore the starkly powerful emotional drama that blazes through Bizet’s source, Prosper Mérimée’s novella. Denuded of the opera’s incidental decorative and comic elements, its twisted tale of the innocent country boy José destroyed by his obsessive infatuation with a mysterious, capricious Romany emerged with fresh immediacy, culminating in a new climax that sees Carmen willing José to murder her.
It’s a brilliant re-imagining of both score and text, based in a powerful evocation of Carmen’s witchlike powers and intuitions. But this new perspective, directed by Gerard Jones, ignores all that: his contemporary Carmen is just an ordinary jiving, flirting chick of a thing in a minidress and trainers who plays around with cards and deftly removes her knickers to buy José off when she is arrested.
Jones takes no advantage of the venue’s unique ambience beyond suggesting that we are in a sleazy nightclub. The orchestra is at the back of the stage, the conductor distractingly facing the audience; the characters’ exits and entrances are clumsily managed from the wings and the action is heavy-handed.
José wears camouflage trousers to indicate his attachment to the military and Escamillo the toreador presents as a greasy spiv, but otherwise the context is left vague and uninvolving, not least because the performers’ histrionic skills don’t cut the mustard.
They do, however, sing very well indeed. All the cast (bar an actor who silently takes supporting roles) are members of the Royal Opera’s Jette Parker Young Artists scheme, designed to promote vocal talent, and in Wilton’s resonant acoustic they sound terrific. Gyula Nagy has the swagger for Escamillo’s aria, and Micaëla’s sentimental music shows Francesca Chiejina’s gorgeously warm and fluently produced soprano to advantage, earning her the biggest applause. Thomas Atkins’ tenor has all the ardour for José’s Flower Song and Aigul Akhmetshina makes a lushly sensual Carmen, sinuous in the Habanera and sultry in the Seguédilla.
With James Hendry conducting a Southbank Sinfonia alive to the colours of Constant’s orchestration, the musical aspect of Brook’s conception is adequately honoured. But its dramatic impact is minimal.
Until Nov 14. Tickets: 020 7304 4000; roh.org.uk