The Stage

Carmen

Published Monday 1 October 2007 at 12:25 by George Hall

The ENO orchestra strikes up the prelude and plays right through to the final chords like angels.

The chorus sings with vigour and spot-on accuracy. Under Edward Gardner’s discriminating baton Bizet’s score is given a world-class reading.

Much of the singing is excellent. Alice Coote delivers a Carmen of vocal finesse, though her dramatic performance fades in the final scene, where she should blaze. Katie Van Kooten is an impressively lyrical Micaela, David Kempster a forthright Escamillo. Julian Gavin doesn’t suggest the fragmented personality of Don Jose, but he finds both the power and the delicacy to shine from a vocal point of view.

So far, so good. But the visual and dramatic side of the show, in the hands of novice opera director Sally Potter, is a mess. It’s fine in theory to drop what Potter regards as Spanish tourist cliche - though there’s far more to the Spanish setting than that - but you have to replace it with something equally strong or the piece disintegrates. Jettisoning the spoken dialogue leaves the characters, their situations and motivations high and dry. Anyone coming to Carmen for the first time is going to have their work cut out trying to follow the plot. Here it’s impossibly vague and intangible.

The tango dancing is pleasant but irrelevant. The hip hop in the final act is fun but belongs in a different show. Es Devlin’s variable sets don’t provide enough context. ENO audiences deserve better than this.