Should sex come before singing?

As I sit down to write this, I haven’t yet seen Calixto Bieito’s production of Bizet’s Carmen. But even before its opening at the London Coliseum last night it had excited a degree of press interest.

Bieito has a reputation as one of opera’s enfants terribles: he it was who splattered all manner of simulated sexual activity over Don Giovanni, and who notoriously opened his version of Verdi’s A Masked Ball with a tableau showing a row of men sitting on lavatories with their trousers around their ankles.

These stagings excited so much rage among ENO’s more conservative sponsors and supporters that the management indicated Bieito would not be asked back. But now a new regime has relented: this interpretation of Carmen has previously been seen and admired in several European houses over the past few years, and it should draw big audiences here. I shall address it with an open mind.

The bigger question has to be whether opera is well served as an art form by the directorial sensationalism which has been the dominant fashion for the past quarter of a century.

I feel ambivalent about this, and don’t want to jump on any bandwagons: some traditional productions in period costume are deader than dodos, and some deconstructed and wilfully provocative productions can be thrilling and revelatory. It all depends on the intelligence and musicality of the director responsible, and the quality of execution.

David Pountney – now top banana at Welsh National Opera and a director who broadly belongs in Bieito’s camp – once told me that he grew up feeling that opera was like some precious bibelot kept carefully dusted on his grandmother’s front-parlour mantelpiece. It couldn’t be touched and it couldn’t be moved.

Pountney, Bieito and a whole generation have certainly done something very useful in refusing to treat opera with granny’s genteel reverence. Instead, they have tested its resilience by picking it up, turning it upside down, and asking awkward questions about its provenance. What are these music dramas really about? Do they have anything to tell us, or are they just pretty figurines, clothed in music, which allow us a pleasant escapist dream? Does opera belong in the museum or the hard cold world outside?

This tougher approach has often worked wonders and brought opera closer to the cultural mainstream. But you can’t do this by taking anything at face value and – to take several very different examples – productions such as Stefan Herheim’s Parsifal, Jonathan Miller’s Rigoletto, Peter Sellars’s Theodora and Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Eugene Onegin all work because, by removing the librettos from their original contexts, they open up levels of significance that would not have otherwise have been evident.

This element of surprise and freshness is essential to good theatre of any sort – telling an audience something that it doesn’t know already is the surest way to break the carapace of smugness and make us sit up and pay attention. The problems start when lesser fry confuse surprise with shock, and shock with mere titillation and frisson. Just how naughty can we be?

At which point one thinks of the old Flanders and Swann nursery song about giggling over “pee, po, belly, bum and drawers”. In 2012, there’s something pathetically infantile and naive about the notion that the graphic depiction of sexual acts and spurts of gore will automatically interest or excite anybody, and Bieito is one among many who have on occasion feebly fallen back on this tactic when he can’t find anything else to explore (I certainly think this was the case with his unilluminating Masked Ball).

But this isn’t altogether the directors’ fault. A lot of pressure is put on them by managements to come up with something wacky or weird that will sell tickets and attract short-term publicity. The result is that productions have tended to become excessively conceptual – by which I mean the directors work more through their designers than they do through the singers, who are often left merely to decorate the tableaux.

What opera directors need to be now is more sensitively musical. If they want to surprise us, they will have to try a bit harder, and the best way to start is by listening quietly to the score and let it work on their imagination. Just slamming something into a contemporary setting and letting us know that you’ve watched some Tarantino movies doesn’t wash any more.

It’s stale buns, which will neither attract a new audience nor satisfy the existing one.