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A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
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London,
Fiona Maddocks's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Sally Potter.
Cast: English National Opera, Edward Gardner (cond), Es Devlin (des), Alice Coote (Carmen), Julian Gavin (Don Jose), Katie Van Kooten (Micaela), David Kempster (Escamillo), Elena Xanthoudakis (Frasquita), Fiona Murphy (Mercedes), Andrew Rees (Dancairo), Alan Oke (Remendado), Ronan Collett (Morales), Graeme Danby (Zuniga)
Description: Film director Sally Potter makes her operatic debut with a modern-day interpretation of Bizet's classic tale of love, passion and murder, featuring mezzo-soprano Alice Coote in her role debut as Carmen and Australian tenor Julian Gavin as Don Jose. Conducted by Edward Gardner. Sung in English with surtitles.
Trains: Tube: Leicester Square/Charing Cross 
, Tube / Bus: 3, 6, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 23, 24, 29, 53, 77a, 88, 91, 139 
Phone: 0871911 0200
Website: www.eno.org
Email: access@eno.org
Gipsy who won't stamp her feet: Alice Coote's Carmen lets herself be wooed by Julian Gavin's soldier Don José
English National Opera's new Carmen, conducted by Edward Gardner and starring Alice Coote, was certainly original. No sexual energy, no cigarette factory, no smoke, no castanets, no Seville, no smut, no intensity.
Add to this a gipsy heroine who refuses to dance and a vapid staging which misunderstands Bizet's music and you have a holy mess. The implications for ENO, so wide of the mark in this core repertoire piece, are worrying.
This was film director Sally Potter's first opera. The avalanche of behind-scene blogging these past weeks must once have seemed a good idea.
Instead, it courted disaster. We knew so much about this production by the time the curtain went up we hardly needed to be there. Many wished they weren't, and left at the interval.
Potter is an elegant and gifted filmmaker. But she has ignored opera's simple imperative: to let the music propel the story. Too often visual ornament - screens opening or shutting meaninglessly, jerky CCTV-style footage - pushed Bizet's enthralling score to the background. No one objects to experiment. I am not calling for mantillas and flounced skirts. Two male transvestites obliged us with those. All one wants is dramatic coherence.
We first see Carmen herself as a blown-up film image, which reduces Coote, as she waits on stage, to Lilliputian insignificance. Worse, each time she has a foot-stamping aria she stands passively aside while two low-cal tango dancers take centre stage. So the Habanera becomes theirs, not hers.
Es Devlin's mainly abstract designs suggested a Sangatte-style world of surveillance. It was sometimes impossible to know what was going on.
Drifting momentarily in Act III, I jolted to alertness to see what looked like a ship in a dark sea. Where was I? Peter Grimes? Titanic? The programme said "somewhere near a border", but why the coloured wigwam?
The accomplished Julian Gavin tried heroically to raise the tone as the soldier Don José, here a security guard recalled to duty by a txt msg. Katie Van Kooten's Micaela had pathos. The orchestra did well despite the plodding tempi, and Christopher Cowell's translation had punch. The walk-on sniffer dog provided a bow-wow factor and stole the show.
• Until 23 November. Information: 0870 145 0200, www.eno.org/carmen.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Fantastic music; fabulous singing; rubbish production!
- Carolyn Nield, Bromley, UK
Sally Potter's Carmen is opera for the twenty-first century -- while it's also engaged with the opera's original roots. Bizet wrote it for the Opera Comique, and Potter uses tango and a witty translation of the libretto to respect this association with comic opera. When it comes to the drama, I thought Alice Coote was remarkable as a believable human being (as opposed to the weird queeny, doll-like "idea" most people have of Carmen) trying to survive, which made her death truly tragic. I find it odd that so many critics are looking for the final scene to give them the big O - it's not sexy, it's appalling - and this is underlined by the performance and the music. I enjoyed Ed Gardner's conducting, and thought the orchestra were buoyant and dynamic, fully a character in the story. As was the set: I loved the use of video projection, and the dramatic use of frames within frames to give a sense of entrapment. The tango in the Act 4 overture sent shivers down my spine, by using the forestage in contrast to the very tightly controlled Act 3 on the bridge. This production brought me closer to the excitement of opera than I've ever been.
- Sm, UK
This production is a total misunderstanding, not only of opera generally but of this opera particularly. Cinema's great power is its ability to give us close-ups for drama - yet much of the time the front of the stage is empty, and/or the action is at the back of the stage or there is music without the words to stitch the story together, thus it is neither cinematic nor operatic. Why doesn't someone have the balls or the professionalism to spot such a failure before opening night? Why is there no-one who knows the difference between an idea and a gimmick? But most of all, where is the story telling?
- Glynn Christian, London UK
