Opera Stagings: Carmen and Midsummer Night’s
Dream
Two operas with stagings set
far from their originals, as once envisaged. At the Royal Opera House, Carmen, seen by the excellent cinema
streaming offering, had a high, wide and steeply raked, one-side-of-a-ziggurat,
set of steps. Benjamin Britten’s Midsummer
Night’s Dream, put on by the English National Opera, was fixated on beds,
of the sleep-in sort (but a pun was intended..).
One succeeded; the other not
really.
