Carmen (review)

In 2007, London provided an institutionally sanctioned Carmen bonanza, with stagings of the opera from both the Royal Opera House (ROH) and English National Opera (ENO), as well as the British Film Institute’s re-release of Otto Preminger’s 1954 film of Oscar Hammerstein II’s Carmen Jones, and a new production of that musical by Jude Kelly for the Royal Festival Hall. Both Kelly’s production and Francesca Zambello’s staging of the opera for the ROH (revived in 2008) sought musical and theatrical “authenticity” and were critically acclaimed for this commitment.

By contrast, Sally Potter’s vilified staging of the opera for ENO, the first time since the early 1980s that the noted film director has returned to her roots in live performance, relocated the action of Carmen to “the present” (as Hammerstein did for his World War II–set musical), turning Seville’s town square into an unnamed contemporary city. Reversing the trend for revered authenticity, Potter’s production used both nonoperatic performance (tango, drag, and body-popping) and video projections. A gauze scrim across the forestage acting as a screen for video projection recalled Potter’s early Expanded Cinema works, in which medium and bodies interacted onstage. It placed a cinematic frame around the action, recapturing the shocking modernity of the opera’s first, equally vilified, performance. The use of film brought opera—--and particularly this opera’s dated exoticism and misogyny—--into the present, while arguing that we should open our eyes to our compulsive re-enactment of similar politics, not least through an insistence on authenticity.

Potter’s production opened with an austere modernist set at odds with the ethnomusical jauntiness of Bizet’s overture: to stage left, the incurve of a massive wall separating “us” from “them,” the first element of the starkly urban sets designed by Es Devlin; to stage right, a guard hut where Jose, a polyester-suited private security guard, stared longingly at a calendar image of a sexy flamenco dancer. Video projection translated Jose’s longing to the audience. Carmen’s entry was preceded by a massive close-up as she peered into the security camera “broadcasting” to the gauze. Carmen thus appeared as the realization of the flamenco dancer, manifesting through the screen as fantasy and/ or cinema.

It was not just the closed-circuit television nor the wonderful back-projection for act 3 of headlights streaming down a motorway that made this Carmen cinematic, but rather the sense of scale suggestively introduced by the scrim close-ups. Potter uncovered a dynamic of “close-ups” in the duets between Carmen and Jose, combined with “widescreen” action, including a large chorus of sex workers and smugglers, four male body-poppers, and the urban underworld that these characters suggest. Carmen became that essentially postmodern (and fantastical) figure, the nomad, a border-slippage reinforced by the orchestra under the command of Ed Gardner. Their vivacious account of the score highlighted the way in which Bizet patched and pastiched popular music and opera. Some critics referred to the “English color” of their playing, meaning that it lacked a serious investment in the original’s exotic “color” identified by commentators (including Friedrich Nietszche) with an “African” savagery inherent in Carmen herself.

That the production is deliberately alienated from this exoticism is signaled at significant moments such as Carmen’s reading of the cards and the overture to act 4 by a couple dancing tango, led by renowned tanguilero Pablo Veron, star of Potter’s film The Tango Lesson (1997). Tango, drawing on a combination of Roma, Spanish, Jewish, and North African musical themes, which were intermixing as tango in Buenos Aires concurrently with Bizet’s appropriation of the same themes, is at once a signifier of authenticity and hybridity. Doubling Carmen and Jose, the tanguileros also embodied both the exotic and the erotic charge associated with Carmen by staging it as a literal exstasis.

This provided the space for a revelatory performance by mezzo-soprano Alice Coote. Best known for breeches roles...