La Tragédie De Carmen by Marius Constant, Jean-Claude Carriére, Peter Brook (review)

performance notes LA TRAGEDIE DE CARMEN Adapted from Bizet's opera by Marius Constant, JeanClaude Carriere, and Peter Brook Directed by Peter Brook Vivian Beaumont Theater (New York) William 0. Beeman Peter Brook has built some remarkable artistic bridges in his production la trag6die de Carmen. He has effected a successful merger of operatic vocal virtuosity and imaginative dramatic ideas. He has enlarged and fused several distinct aspects of the character of Carmen, raising her to near supernatural status. Finally, he has taken an essentially Western theatrical and musical classic and given it a solid grounding within the framework of the traditional theatre-especially the ritual theatre-of the non-Western world. This production seeks consciously to avoid any appearance of being the Carmen of Bizet and his librettists Meilhac and Hal6vy. Neither is it the Carmen of the original novelist, Prosper Merim6e. Brook appears to have taken the original and, in trimming it to 88 minutes, changed it in unexpected ways, as if to break down the audience's expectations about other aspects of the production. Carmen; Don Jose; Escamillo; Lillas Pastia; Lt. Zuniga; Micaela; Carmen's husband, Garcia and a mysterious old woman (played by a male actor) are stripped bare, and pounded into archetypes. Carmen above all is turned by Brook into a kind of earth-mother goddess. She becomes the root of all passion : wife, mistress and whore. The men are mere appendages of her will. Like Don Jose, weak to begin with, they are unable to resist her. She appears in the play first wrapped in canvas-an inanimate object appearing from a blackout in the middle of a near-bare arena with a dirt floor ringed with rocks. The back wall and wings of the playing area are covered with bare, rough wooden planking. Don Jose and Micaela appear, and 68 Carmen emerges on the stage first as a disembodied arm, holding a fortune-telling card-a kind of norn, casting the fate of the world around her. When she finally reveals herself she is all wonton lust. Rolling a cigar up and down her thigh, she circles it lasciviously around her tongue and lips, all the while leering at Don Jose. Later we see her other aspects: responding to Don Jose in tender passion, consorting with Lillas Pastia to fleece customers while offering her sexual favors, acting the fishwife with her husband, and playing a prim and proper mistress to Escamillo's macho posturing In the bull ring. Brook's direction demands not only fine acting, but also the ability to achieve some epic distance from the characters. He is not content with the tawdry gypsy of Merim6e's novel. Brook's Carmen is a goddess-the monstrous and omniscient Carmen who arises from the dust and rocks In many forms, knowing both her own fate and the fate of those she destroys. Her song is the song of the Lorelei, so it must be beautiful. But it is also a song that must be tinged with an awareness of Its own power. Like Isis, Ishtar, Durga/Kali and Venus, Carmen can not be thought of in terms of good and evil. She simply is-and always will be-a universal force. To gain the leverage needed to create drama on this scale, a restructuring of the conventions of opera was necessary. Conventional opera does not allow such subtlety. With performers fighting to effect a presence on stage from behind a symphony orchestra, having only one or two rehearsals before emerging before an audience, it is hardly any wonder that opera is more often a celebration of vocal strength and virtuosity than of dramatic nuance. Thus, Brook has taken some radical steps to achieve the effects he desires. Ci) 0 'a CO He has reduced the size of the orchestra enormously, and placed it behind the singers. This means that the singers cannot see the conductor. As a result, the orchestra must accompany the singers, following their lead. In doing this, Brook may well have created the first Western opera which takes its pacing from the performers on stage, and not from the orchestra pit. This positioning of the orchestra also means that...