Music

Carmen: Contemporay spin on Bizet’s opera fails to convince

There is much to admire in this production, but not in its central conceit

Dinyar Vania (Don José) and Paula Murrihy (Carmen) in Irish National Opera’s Carmen. Photograph: Ruth Medjber

Michael Dungan
Tue Mar 8 2022 - 09:43

Carmen

Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆

Carmen is sexy. Every man on stage desires her, and the women enjoy watching to see which one she will bewitch, devour and spit out next. Which is what she does – she’s a serial and unapologetic seducer.

Her appeal goes beyond how she moves, uses her eyes and body, how she sings and dances. She combines all that with a fearless, charismatic and independent spirit and an indomitable inner strength that she radiates from start to finish.

She, the opera and Bizet were all immediately rejected in 1875 by the first Paris audience, partly owing to their moral outrage at having such a woman presented as heroine. If trying to live among the opera-goers of Paris, Carmen might well have been rejected, an outsider.

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Carmen-as-outsider is the chosen angle declared in his printed note by director Paul Curran in Irish National Opera's long-awaited, pandemic-postponed co-production with Opera Philadelphia and Seattle Opera. For Curran, the opera's relevance today stems from how it resonates with people made outsiders because of their age, race, sex or creed, etc.

I couldn’t buy it. On stage, Carmen is the polar opposite of an outsider. She is an alpha-female: at work, in the community and among her friends.

Curran’s conception undermines the direction, chiefly concerning the central love triangle where the expected tension is AWOL. Don José – mellifluously but pointlessly sung by tenor Dinyar Vanya – is presented as a pathetic sap, always engaged in introspective, self-pitying soliloquy instead of actually interacting with his rivals or Carmen. He is triggered more by references to his mother than by either of the women he dithers between. Tellingly, scene-wreckingly, this drew laughter.

Elsewhere there is much to savour, above all in how mezzo Paula Murrihy inhabits the title role. She and soprano Celine Byrne – as love-rival Micaëla – are captivating in their solos. Supporting roles are also very well taken, particularly Rachel Croash and Niamh O'Sullivan as Carmen's gypsy friends Frasquita and Mercédès, and a commanding Brendan Collins as the smuggler Dancaire. Conductor Kenneth Montgomery draws lively and potent singing from the excellent chorus and rich and balanced playing from the orchestra in music that is amongst the most familiar and beloved in all opera. And the whole look, in Gary McCann's 1950s costumes and wrong-side-of-the-tracks urban grittiness, is large and breath-taking, above all the seemingly endless freight depot created for Act 3.

Until March 12th

Frasquita