Wexford Festival Opera, 2025
Rebecca Warren, Nate Ben-Horin, Tom Deazley, Sarah Richmond, Dafydd Allen, Philip Kalmanovitch, Roisín Walsh, Conor Cooper, Vladimir Sima, Jonah Halton
Jerome Hynes Theatre, National Opera House, Wexford - 22nd October 2025
There comes a time surely when you don't feel the need to see another traditional Carmen. I know I reached that point a long time ago. There may also come a point also when you think that you don't need to see another attempt to rework and reinterpret Bizet's opera through a modern, feminist perspective of social commentary. Fortunately opera is a living art, and if a work is good enough there are always relevant truths and new meanings that can explored. There ought to be a way to get back to the essence of the work, strip away all the accumulated mannerisms, old-fashioned values and imposed modern reinterpretations and just get back to the human heart of the work. Well, with Carmen there already is, and it's called La tragédie de Carmen. Proof of how effective this work can still be as an opera is made apparent in this production directed by Tom Deazley, further stripped down to its essentials as a 'Pocket opera' at Wexford Festival Opera.
La tragédie de Carmen is an unusual case. Many operas have been adapted and reworked for other media - a Broadway musical or a movie adaptation - and it's common for an opera to be drawn from an existing theatre piece, but not so common for an opera to be taken back to form a closer relationship with its source material. The history of Bizet's own experience with Carmen at the Opéra-Comique is complicated enough, but aside from going back to the original Prosper Mérimée novella, Peter Brooke and Jean-Claude Carrière's opera-theatrical reworking of the material has become a popular way of presenting a work that it has to be said has become over-familiar, to the extent that perhaps its original meaning has been obscured. If you want to assess the essence and worth of any drama, it's surely to be found in the validity of its human story. That is very much the focus of Tom Deazley’s production.
Of course individuals only behave within or in reaction to the rules society places on them, so it is important to ensure that the story has context. Carmen, by choosing to act outside the normal rules of behaviour in respectable society, can be seen as proto-feminist, but how she does that in her promiscuity and criminality is hardly one that could be considered by many as much of a role model. But then with a few exceptions - and none of them men - neither are the behaviours of those who come into contact with the young woman. The saintly Michaela and Don José’s off stage mother, behaving more in line with patriarchal expectations, are hardly more realistic modern female role models.
Whether this tells us anything much about Carmen or whether it speaks of the society that imposes certain expectations of behaviour upon women and enforces the suppression of true feelings is something that can be swayed one way or the other depending on the intentions of the director. Brooke's La tragédie de Carmen allows for more scope for a director to explore such questions, but to see it purely in those terms can make the opera more of a commentary on society and risks missing the heart of Carmen, the one that is vividly described in Bizet's music: the joy of living and snatching each moment; living 'dangerously' as a 'oiseau rebelle'; the human story and indeed the tragedy of the human story.
In a way, considering the limited options open to an independent and sexually liberated young woman from a minority (gypsy) background, Carmen's flirtations and loves can only end one way. In a typical traditional drama anyway. But that doesn't necessarily have to be the case, or at least it doesn't need to play out that way in a modern production. With a terrific central performance from the versatile and brilliant Sarah Richmond, Tom Deazley's direction manages to capture the wild sensuous swagger of Bizet, the dramatic tragedy of Mérimée, the character and social insights of Brooke, and brings another facet out of it all, which is indeed the human aspect of being caught up in it all.
As far as the traditional story of Bizet's opera goes, this version remains very familiar, but it's definitely noticeable that it is much more focussed. While you might expect more dialogue and performances in an adaptation from operatic to theatrical, instead even the original spoken dialogue parts of the original opera have been reduced to the absolute minimum and only to introduce a scene. Side stories and minor characters are largely removed, the role of Michaela significantly reduced but given tighter focus without losing her arias. More importantly, she comes across as a regular person, not the saintly figure that can often be presented as a counterpoint to Carmen.
Carmen’s problems can also be boiled down essentially not to her wild nature as much as her problems with men. There is no question she lives in a man’s world, but she refuses to bend to their desires, or in as much as she is able to. You don't have to look too far past regular current news reports to see that domestic violence against women and murders of young women still persists in society, so it's not as if the opera is taking either a traditionalist or a revisionist view. Again however, this 'issue' is acknowledged in the production without making it the focus and getting preachy about something that an opera is not going to change.
So much so that Deazley uses the idea of playing with fate as a means of showing where this is all going to lead. Carmen the gypsy deals out cards and is dealt with a hand herself she does not have the power to change. You can only gamble with fate so much before the tables turn on you. This is the tragedy of Carmen. There is a choice to be made in how that fate is depicted however, and the director admirably chooses not to serve up the violent ending that the traditional Carmen imposes, running the risk that it looks like she gets what she deserves for fooling around with the wrong men. The men in La tragédie de Carmen all pay a high price for their violent and abusive nature, including Carmen's jailbird husband appearing in this version as an additional character (and not surviving long!), so Carmen's only tragedy is that she gets mixed up with all these brutes. Deazley then leaves her fate open at the conclusion, certainly facing danger and death but not delivering the expected fatal blow. We all know how such situations are likely to end without having to see it enacted.
For a smaller scale production at the Jerome Hynes studio theatre in the National Opera House at Wexford, the production values are superb. Lisa Krügel provides an excellent all-purpose Blood Wedding style set with a classic Spanish adobe wall and an orange tree, without playing to kitsch depiction of an idealised postcard image of Spain. There is even room here to open that up to a village square with a bar. Subtle changes of lighting effectively set mood, scene and establish time as characters walk off and on again. The singing performances all contributed to the success of this interpretation. The versatile mezzo-soprano Sarah Richmond, familiar to those of us who have seen her in productions with the Belfast Ensemble and NI Opera as well as most recently in Jennifer Walshe's extraordinary MARS, gives exactly the strong charismatic performance that the opera needs while still retaining a degree of human vulnerability. Dafydd Allen's tenor had a steely menace, with excellent enunciation of the French libretto. It was a brave decision to perform this in French without surtitles and only a few words of English language dialogue, but familiarity with the story and very clear visual storytelling points put everything across. Roisín Walsh was an excellent Michaela and Philip Kalmanovitch played the role of the bullfighter Escamillo authoritatively.
Under the musical direction of Rebecca Warren and Nate Ben-Horin, with Warren playing a piano reduction of the score, the pacing seemed slower than you would expect for Carmen. Since the chouses have been removed and the opera has been stripped of its swagger in this version as La tragédie de Carmen, the more gentle touch of the piano reduction suited the refreshingly sensitive tone of the production. Carmen may need revisited now and again only rarely, but as long as there are sympathetic teams in place like this one at Wexford, it can still prove to be dramatically, musically and emotionally revealing.
External links: Wexford Festival Opera
