CARMEN (Royal Opera)**

 

By Imogen

Link: https://stream.roh.org.uk/packages/carmen-2018/videos/carmen-2018  £3

Available until: Friday 9^th October 2020

This is the silliest production I’ve ever seen. If you buy this I think you should minimise the screen and just listen. I think Barrie Kosky the director and Katrin Lea Tag the designer are on something. I really do.

They’ve cut the dialogue and they’ve got some narrator saying what happens in the bits they skipped. (The dialogue can be annoying too because it’s all in French and no one really speaks French but you get to see the interactions between the characters and the chemistry which is a really important part of the story. And it’s not like there aren’t surtitles hanging right there above the stage (except you can’t see them in these videos so there’s subtitles instead)_.

The set is basically this big flight of stairs like the Act 1 finale of Grease and it gets in the way of everything and it just looks really dangerous. It is quite a dangerous opera but you’re supposed to be worrying about people killing each other, not falling down the stairs. It’s so distracting. The staircase does display some of the dancing quite nicely but it also restricts it because you can’t do nearly as much on stairs as you can on a flat dancefloor. Besides Carmen isn’t supposed to be about the dancing. It’s an opera, not a ballet.

The dancing is mostly really good and even the opera singers do a really good job. They do look a bit silly dancing around on the stairs for no reason but they do it very well. I did enjoy most of Otto Pichler’s choreography, I just thought it shouldn’t have been in Carmen. It’s just the cape dancing that was really bad. Anyone who has watched Strictly Come Dancing will know that the paso doble is a very powerful dance and you have to twirl your cape with real conviction. These dancers skipped around the stage like camp goats and it didn’t look right at all. I’d give them a 4 at most.

But the main problem with this opera is it doesn’t feel like Carmen. Carmen is supposed to be hot and spicy. The air should be charged with sexual tension. This Carmen is about as hot as Boris Johnson in a fridge.

The costumes are really odd too. Carmen shows up in a gorilla outfit. I don’t know what that’s all about but it was pretty clear (even though I had a good idea already) that me and the director just weren’t on the same page and I wasn’t going to like this production. I still watched the whole thing because I’m dedicated and Carmen did wear a really nice dress later on but the production is all just too weird. Carmen has a good story, it doesn’t need directors messing with it and trying to be clever. Just tell the story. (And the random hysterical laughter, that was just weird, what was that about?) But I did like the scene where Carmen, Frasquita and Mercedes were playing cards. That actually had a bit of atmosphere.

I’m not saying don’t rent it. I’m just saying if you do rent it, you might like it better if you don’t actually watch it. You’ll probably enjoy it quite a lot if you just listen because the music really is very good. Conductor Jakub Hrusa makes the score sound really beautiful and even the Toreador March didn’t make me think ‘oh no not this again’. It did make an odd contrast with the stage but I’m not complaining. Not about the conducting anyway.

The singers are also really good.. Anna Goryachova (Carmen) has a dark, rich voice which is beautiful to listen to and full of the sensuality that the production is missing. She really is perfect casting and her acting is so good, I’m sure she could play Carmen properly if she was allowed to.

Francesco Meli is a little bit older than I imagine Don Jose being but he still has a lovely smooth tenor and he acted Don Jose’s desperation very well when things weren’t going quite so well with Carmen. Kostas Smoriginas has a powerful voice and he doesn’t struggle with the low notes at the ends of the long phrases like a lot of Escamillos.

Kristina Mkhitaryan gave a good impression of Micaela’s innocence and she made her a bit less boring than usual. Her voice is lovely and didn’t get rough at the top. Jacquelyn Stucker and Aigul Akhmetshina (who is also a brilliant Carmen) gave Frasquita and Mercedes lots of character and brought the production to life a little bit.

So no I didn’t like this very much but most people would say the most important parts of an opera are the conducting and singing and it’s fair to say the ROH got those bits right.