Opera’s most notorious femme fatale makes a helluva entrance: the moment we meet Carmen in Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera, we know she’s a bad girl headed for a worse end. The downward chromatic slide of her opening aria tells us she’s a woman at odds with the system; the swaying habanera rhythm says she’s a seductress – a crime punishable by death in the operatic canon.
But in Opera Australia’s new production, Carmen is not the sultry vixen we know from the past 150 years: the soprano Danielle de Niese arrives dressed in a factory boiler suit, with a swagger usually reserved for opera’s men. It is present-day Seville and Carmen has finished her shift; De Niese moves through the crowd of female co-workers and male onlookers with the bravado of someone who has experienced the best and worst of being the centre of attention, and decided to square up rather than shy away. She stretches out the tension of a day on the factory line and hustles for a ciggie. The Habanera aria is usually played tits first, with swaying hips and lots of leg; De Niese’s take, both weary and wary, is a signal that things are different this time.
It’s an early parry in a three-hour duel between the director, Anne-Louise Sarks, and not only Bizet’s opera but opera itself – its codes, its norms, its way of punishing and killing women. Sarks, who won acclaim for feminist takes on Medea and A Doll’s House, is tasked with bringing Carmen – an opera about a strong-willed and sexually liberated woman who is killed by a jilted and jealous lover – into a post #MeToo era in which sexual violence is still rampant and, on average, one woman is killed every nine days by a current or former partner. It’s also an era in which Opera Australia needs to capture new and younger audiences to survive – so Sarks is also tasked with making it a fun night out.
She has her work cut out for her. Even though the original libretto is fairly sympathetic to Carmen, given the social norms and operatic conventions of its era, the framework is unequivocally patriarchal. Carmen’s story is framed by that of her murderous lover Don José: we meet him first, a good guy and honest worker who loves his mother. We watch him succumb, protesting, to Carmen’s sexual spell; we follow his descent into despair and depravity, corrupted by her influence. And then there’s the music, its tonal harmonies telling us that he is the hero and its chromatic tensions telling us she’s the baddie
Sarks and her creative team put up a good fight and make smart choices – particularly in the first and final acts, where it most counts. The present-day setting emphasises the urgent reality of the violence at the centre of the story. They costume and choreograph early crowd scenes to emphasise the gender, class and social dimensions of this violence; the way a group of men can transform into an attentive pack in the presence of a female body. Pushing back against the bright, jaunty tone of the music, Sarks threads in hints of the violence from the get-go, when José manhandles a female factory worker.
In its middle stretch, the show leans into the spectacle required from opera – and this is where Horwell, coming off the back of Tony and Olivier awards for her work on The Picture of Dorian Gray, comes into her own, deploying flamboyant sequin-sparkled Eurotrash outfits, bright bunches of flowers, jewel-toned string lights, and lashings of Catholic iconography. It’s gorgeous, seductive stuff.
More gorgeous still is the music, beautifully sung and beautifully played by the orchestra – although De Niese, stepping into the role of Carmen for the first time, was underwhelming on opening night, seeming to sacrifice vocals for a more behaviourally authentic performance.
Her version of the character – the first of four Carmens presented in this season, each by a different performer – feels unsatisfying, too. While she brilliantly captures Carmen’s combative side – as much a toreador, in her own way, as her lover Escamillo – she is less convincing as a seductress and a rebel striving for freedom. You don’t get a sense of what she is fighting for, which makes it harder to fight alongside her.
De Niese brought it in for the kill in the final act, however, transmitting the heroic courage and conviction of Carmen: a woman who would rather face death than abandon her values. Sarks and her team close their feminist take on Bizet’s femicidal fantasy by showing a realistic and prolonged struggle culminating in strangulation; a grimly quotidian act of violence when compared with the ways Carmen is usually dispatched – most commonly in a high-drama stabbing.
This production feels caught between the demands of a dramatic spectacle and the desire to show something more raw and ugly – but Bizet’s music, the text and the operatic form are powerfully seductive.
Opera Australia’s Carmen runs until 19 September at Sydney Opera House; and from 15 to 25 November at Regent Theatre, Melbourne
