Carmen, English National Opera, London Coliseum, review

Anyone hoping to storm out of Calixto Bieito’s production of Carmen indignant at its orgiastic obscenity is going to be bitterly disappointed.

Apart from one tastefully occluded (if entirely gratuitous) male nude and some fellatio behind a car, it is certificate 12A, offering nothing to bring a blush to even the primmest cheek.

What a pity: Bizet presents a powerful portrait of destructive power of sexual infatuation, and some of Bieito’s best work (such as his superb adaptation of Houllebecq’s novel Platform) has scrutinized this phenomenon with forensic intensity.

Here, however, hobbled by the quaintly genteel locutions of the translation, we don’t get so much as a whiff of it. Nor do we ever see Carmen as the cat who walked by herself, presciently aware of the fate that awaits her but adamantly preferring a life of risky freedom to one of confined safety. The dialogue is cut: what’s left is dramatically perfunctory.

Bieito’s staging, designed by his regular collaborators Alfons Flores and Merce Palomà, is visually reminiscent of his notorious version of Don Giovanni. The stage is framed by a bare dark box, inside which the only striking elements are a flagpole in Act 1, some bashed-up saloon cars in Acts 2 and 3, and the iconic Osborne sherry hoarding in Act 4. Costuming is colourfully contemporary, and the chorus is handled throughout with skill. But at the centre hangs a total void.

ENO has travelled to Romania and the US to cast the leading roles: couldn’t they have done better closer to home?

Ruxandra Donose is a pretty blonde girl with a nice voice, but her Carmen radiates all the killer eroticism and duende of Miss Honey the nursery school teacher, and vocally she has neither the weight nor the authority to stamp any urgency or subtlety into the music.

Although Adam Diegel hits all José’s notes squarely, his manner is phlegmatic to the point of seeming emotionally disengaged: he never evokes a man sucked into a vortex of madness that leads him to murder what he loves.

On the credit side, there’s some bright and heartfelt singing from Elizabeth Llewellyn as a more than usually assertive Micaela, and the subsidiary sluts, soldiers and smugglers are all first-rate. Leigh Melrose, however, makes faint impression as Escamillo, and although the conductor Ryan Wigglesworth gamely attempts to charge up the orchestra, the performance’s overall voltage remains very low indeed.

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