In Simon Stephens’ version of the
classic opera tale, Carmen is a self-regarding gigolo (Jack Farthing)
prowling through an anonymous European city. Carmen is also the role
taken by a Singer (Sharon Small) visiting the city’s opera, so
dislocated by her globetrotting lifestyle that her life is marshalled
by her smartphone. And costumed as Carmen is Romanian-born
mezzo-soprano Viktoria Vizin, who comments on the other characters
through Bizet arias fractured and reconstructed by Simon Slater and
played by two onstage cellists.
These are not the only characters onstage: Don José is now a cab driver
(Noma Dumezweni, quietly powerful as ever), Escamillo a precarious city
trader, Micaéla a student jilted by her lecturer-lover. Nor is Bizet
the only musical source: recorded snatches play of numbers from Roy
Orbison through Kraftwerk to Sonic Youth. Refracted and re-ordered
words flash up on an LED display. We enter the auditorium through a
mini-installation backstage, past a lifesize bull which lies centre
stage throughout, almost dead but visibly still breathing. There is a
vast amount going on in Stephens’ script and Michael Longhurst’s
production. But what do these 100 minutes add up to?
Stephens’s current output ranges from comparatively straightforward
adaptations of classics to elliptical dramas which he encourages
directors to make their own.
Carmen
Disruption takes the former strain as its jumping-off point, but
its spirit is distinctly in the latter. (It premièred in Hamburg last
year under Stephens’ favoured director-provocateur Sebastian Nübling.)
For me, the crucial question with such work is always whether
individual ideas coalesce through the staging into a cogent whole, or
whether we are left with isolated moments of insight and a generalised
impression that the piece is impressive simply because of its
ostentatious unconventionality. In the end, I think
Carmen Disruption does find
coherence as a collective portrait of modern European urban life: the
city, for instance, is unidentified not because it could be anywhere,
but because nowadays anywhere could as easily be anywhere else. We make
our own self-centred narratives, seldom connecting, just as no
character here speaks to another onstage. But it is a close judgement
call between weighty theatre and unorthodox spectacle as an end in
itself.
Written for the Financial
Times.