'Free your mind of every picture-postcard image of Bizet's Carmen. The only mantillas you'll see in Sally Potter's extraordinary staging are those worn by the drag queens selling merchandise at the opera's climactic bullfight. Free your mind, free your spirit - as our heroine tries so desperately to do - because this is a Carmen for the here and now, where freedom is for the imagination, and escaping the scrutiny of state and CCTV is for dreamers.' So opens Edward Seckerson's review for the The Independent.
He could be talking directly to the critics of the other national broadsheets, whose reviews displayed a bewildering range of disagreements regarding the music, the key performances and the designs, but all felt excluded by Potter's production. Several were riled by Potter's open rejection of the opera's clichés, retorting by calling her updated staging a cliché - although their criticisms often betrayed a longing for a Platonic ideal of Carmen set in the never-never land of passionate, feminine, tragic, exotic Spain.
Dominic McHugh, writing on this site, immediately identifies Potter's oppositional stance to this fantasy land: 'she cleverly makes the opera about 'us' without resorting to cheap gimmicks. In the opening scene, as José sits in his office observing security surveillance video screens, the images on the screens are projected above the stage so that the audience can see them. They show films taken outside the Coliseum and inside the theatre's foyers, confronting us with our own image and forcing us to ask: what is this communal, ritualistic spectacle called 'opera' all about?'
It's not a question that the senior critics seem inclined to ask. The Sunday Times' Hugh Canning was sure that the central theme is not freedom, but 'the destructive power of blind passion,' which Potter specifically critiqued on her blog. Other reviewers offer variations on the same: Carmen's problem is not that she is poor and marginalized, but that (being a woman, and an untamed one to boot) she makes poor romantic choices - and, even more fatally, seduces perfectly good men into doing the same. Thus, many critics felt (like Canning) that 'Alice Coote's lyrical, well-sung Carmen, [was] short on sexual allure' - a criticism that presumes Carmen's main purpose is to seduce the audience with her body, rather than her idea of freedom.
Andrew Clements, writing in The Guardian, wants Carmen to be 'fascinating, alluring' - just as José and Escamillo do. Likewise, Anthony Holden, who expounds in the Observer that 'For all the smoky beauty of Alice Coote's sultry mezzo, a less sexy Carmen I have never seen.' The desire for Carmen to be sexy plays disturbingly into gender stereotypes, and ignores the incisive feminist critiques of opera by writers such as Susan McClary and Catherine Clément. Richard Fairman, in the FT, finds something interesting in Coote's 'wisely underplay[ing] the title role, suggesting many layers of half-revealed psychological truths that make her Carmen a deep and absorbing enigma,' and applauds Potter's 'modern grit.'
The Times' Richard Morrison writes that 'Alice Coote projects the part with beauty, nobility, even delicacy, very different from the brazen blast of the usual Carmens. Her voice has rarely sounded more velvety or lustrous.' Despite this admiration, he argues that 'her character struck me as too cool, too rational, to get herself into such a fix.' Perhaps this is because he regards Potter's evocation of 'forbidding walls topped with razor wire; an oppressed populace spied on by CCTV; menacing cops and booted tarts; desultory, neon-lit bars' as repetitive and repulsive rather than radical - who wants to see poverty on stage, after all?
Rupert Christiansen, writing for The Telegraph, argues, rather, that 'Es Devlin's sets are sparely beautiful and evocative, and Potter generates more intensity and atmosphere than Francesca Zambello did in her drearily conventional version for the Royal Opera' - although Fiona Maddocks, entitling her Evening Standard review 'No Smoke. No Smut,' appears to be missing the same quality of 'intensity' (if that's the equivalent of the rather dismissive smoke and smut she seeks) or duende that Europeans project onto Spanish - and particularly gypsy - culture. Or missing, at least, the thrill of exoticised difference that comes from Carmen being set faraway in both time and space.
Like Maddocks, Anna Picard in the Independent on Sunday wants an escapist shot of Southern passion, and finds the production too English. 'Lacking conventional cues, Gardner seems perplexed by Bizet's penchant for expressing strong emotions in light strokes and light emotions in strong strokes. Though finely played, it does not sound French in the slightest, much less Spanish.' Bizet, having never been to Spain, based his score on popular dance tunes and his imagination to satisfy a nineteenth-century Orientalism - which, worryingly, still seems to be current.
In The Stage, George Hall writes that 'It's fine in theory to drop what Potter regards as Spanish tourist cliché - though there's far more to the Spanish setting than that - but you have to replace it with something equally strong or the piece disintegrates.' He neither discusses the coherence of what Potter has put in place of Bizet's imagined (via Merimée) nineteenth-century Seville, nor what 'far more' there is to that setting.
Clements comments that: 'Sally Potter's new production of Carmen will only reinforce the prejudices of those who don't like opera, or just regard it as pleasant music draped across an inconsequential plot.' But he singles out Potter's innovations for attack, particularly the way she counterpoints Bizet's exoticist patchwork - which brought dancebar tunes into the opera house - with street dance. The night that I saw it, these were the innovations attracting what Ruth Elleson at Opera Today calls 'the newcomers who are the holy grail of the opera house's marketing strategy and who need to be given a reason to return to see other operas in future,' in particular a group of adolescent boys who were humming the Act 4 chorus and body-popping to it on the steps of the ENO as I left.
Elleson's review relies on expectations - about the set, the dialogue and the characters - based on having seen previous performances. She also says that 'the final scene was quite riveting, with José maniacally terrifying and Carmen an emotional wreck.'
For the most part, the online community was more welcoming to the production - perhaps because of Potter's engagement with the blogosphere via the ENO mini-site. Blogger Intermezzo makes the point that, overall, 'Potter is out to illuminate, not to shock.' While noting the orchestra's English sound, she thought it 'a perfectly judged (but perhaps controversial) degree of Anglo-Saxon restraint from Edward Gardner in the pit matching the low key of the production.' The Public Reviews, a blog that offers members of public the opportunity to intervene in the critical process, also praised the musical direction.
Robert Sharp, who works with Fifty Nine - the team who designed and created the CCTV surveillance footage for the production - notes with interest the divisions and contradictions in the broadsheet press, suggesting that the online world offers an opportunity for further commentary. He also notes that the mini-site offers 'an interesting method of engaging with audiences, and by-passing the traditional 'gate-keepers' in the press.'
The mini-site's public review forum attracted positive reviews from many, including Geoff Andrew, head of programming at the BFI, and Peter Bazalgette of Endemol. Keith Clarke ended his review for influential web magazine Musical America with approbation for both the mini-site and the 'supremely atmospheric' production: 'ENO worked hard to make a splash with this Carmen, producing a dedicated interactive website complete with director's blog and an invitation to audiences to post comments and get involved. In the end, it is what happens on stage that matters, and the company could not have hoped for a better start to its 2007-'08 Sky Arts season.'
Lloyd Davis, a social media blogger at Perfect Path, drew attention to the 'post-geek bloggery' of the mini-site and applauds the ENO for dropping 'the perceived barriers [of] (lack of) editorial control and shining the light on the creative process too early'. Certainly, the gate-keepers of opera criticism (perhaps they saw a little of themselves reflected in the male Chorus of security guards policing the Wall that cuts off access to a world they themselves cannot enter?) came out with guns blazing, telling Potter to put her hands in the air. Several senior critics - especially Anthony Holden - told Potter off for transgressing the Magic Circle of opera with her backstage revelations.
Lucy Powell seems to sum up the critical mood with her Times article 'Hands Off Our Opera', which shows a closing of operatic ranks by critics and insiders against film directors. She appears oblivious to the long tradition of cross-over between opera and film, which includes such luminaries as Franco Zeffirelli and Lucino Visconti. Powell sets out to prove that film directors are incapable of directing opera - but suggests rather that opera is a gated community, and anyone who tries to enter will be savaged. Michael Coveney, blogging for What's On Stage, suggests that there is a critical conspiracy to praise certain events, and damn others, and wonders how 'the opera critics can't at least admit that the transposition of a military guard and gypsy community to the world of CCTV surveillance, smuggling and prostitution is entirely brilliant and successful.'
By Sophie Mayer
ENO's production of Bizet's Carmen, directed by Sally Potter, continues at the London Coliseum until mid-November.