Strip all the packaging off Bizet’s Carmen – the cigarette factory girls, the smugglers, the matadors’ parade, y viva España – and what are you left with? A focused tragedy involving just four people. That’s what Peter Brook argued when, in 1981, he created La Tragédie de Carmen. Composer Marius Constant cut, pasted and rearranged Bizet’s score for a chamber ensemble, and Brook took the dialogue back to something closer to the Prosper Mérimée novella, Bizet’s original source, reinstating Carmen’s inconvenient husband, for instance.
But let’s be honest: for most opera companies, staging La Tragédie de Carmen is less about seeking dramatic truth than about the opportunity to sell Bizet’s famous tunes with fewer overheads, in a format lasting about half the duration of a regular Carmen. The Royal Opera’s production is a vehicle for the young professionals on its Jette Parker Young Artists programme – its second in the atmospherically shabby setting of Wilton’s Music Hall, following last year’s Oreste – and as a showcase, it cut both ways. All four singers demonstrate that they are capable of taking their roles in a full-scale Carmen one day soon, but none comes out seeming like the finished article. It feels like a student show.
One problem is that, without all the local colour, without the support of a chorus to react to the principals, and especially in a venue as small as Wilton’s, the focus on the singers’ acting increases exponentially. Gerard Jones’s staging – set, in Cécile Trémolières’s design, on bare black steps with a glitterball overhead and with the orchestra on view at the top – strives for an intensity that is not realised, and puts the singers under unforgivingly close scrutiny.
The best all-round performance comes from Russian mezzo Aigul Akhmetshina as Carmen herself, her mezzo velvety and insolent, throwing off a cool habanera while peeling a satsuma. Francesca Chiejina is good-girl Micaëla, saddled with a puppyish demeanour and a baby-pink jumper with kittens on; she will sing this role well when she can bring more expression to her powerful, fluid soprano. But Gyula Nagy, as the strutting, purple-suited Escamillo, needs more vocal suavity this close up, and Thomas Atkins, singing through an unannounced cold as a twitching, bullied Don José, needs more vocal nuance. James Hendry conducts, facing the audience at the very back, and gets a lively, well-paced performance from the Southbank Sinfonia players, but it’s not enough. Bizet’s Carmen is a hard show to bring off. Perhaps Brook’s is even harder.
•At Wilton’s Music Hall, London, until 14 November. Box office: 020-7702 2789.
