Carmen, Mid Wales Opera, review: 'lazy and lacklustre'

Jonathan Miller must do better than this if he wants to justify his constant complaint that nobody wants to employ him any more. His small-scale production of Bizet’s Carmen for Mid Wales Opera is lazy and lacklustre, devoid of any sense of the sultry heat, picturesque poverty or compulsive eroticism that give the opera its eternal allure.

Nothing has been done to generate sexual electricity between Carmen and José; the outbreaks of violence are lamentably if not ludicrously staged (when someone draws a gun you want to laugh); and there is no undercurrent of duende and doom. This is a Home Counties Carmen for tea-tray audiences.

It didn’t have to be so deadly genteel. Nicky Shaw’s designs economically evoke the Franco era – an environment in which the drama can easily be made vividly real. Rory Bremner’s translation is smart, slick and streetwise, and Stephen McNeff’s skilful reorchestration, including guitar and saxophone, has a salty Hispanic tang. Nicholas Cleobury conducts the band of ten trenchantly, but the whole enterprise is scuppered by Miller’s failure to galvanise the cast with any dramatic or emotional urgency.

The blonde Australian mezzo-soprano Helen Sherman sings the title role. In the dialogue (cut to a minimum, and well delivered on the whole), she makes no bones about her native accent, and the character comes across more as a mouthy Germaine Greer – or slumming-it Greer Garson – than sex-bomb Rita Hayworth or Anna Magnani. Sherman sings with an assured and even-toned elegance, but a Carmen who is neither dangerously feline nor spiritually apart is no Carmen at all.

The temperature is further lowered by Leonel Pinheiro’s dull dog of a José, who seemed awfully out of sorts throughout and conveyed no sense of a decent man degraded by infatuation. Technically, he isn’t ready for the role, and the end of the Flower Song was a painful struggle. In the third act, he relaxed somewhat and one heard his vocal potential.

Elin Prichard, a Micaela in Alice band and short white socks, pushed her light-lyric soprano too hard in her third-act aria; Nicholas Lester sang cleanly and incisively as Escamillo, but needs more leering bravado. The Mercedes (Marta Fontanals-Simmons), Frasquita (Daisy Brown), Zuniga (Simon Wilding) and Morales (Jan Capinski) were all good.

I’m a huge admirer of Mid Wales Opera, but this cannot be counted one of their successes.

Touring until Nov 13. Tickets: 01686 614555; midwalesopera.co.uk

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