Opera Stagings

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.

Carmen is supposedly set in Sevilla or in the mountains of Andalucía nearby. Neither location is remotely suggested by the ROH staging. Rather, the stage structure reminded me of an overly precipitous, old fashioned standing terrace at a football ground. This was not the association conducive to absorption in the opera’s music and drama.

(And I was fearful for the cast. There was such a lot of tearing up and down these steps. Surely there must be a good statistical chance that someone would stumble and fall? Not all the performers were agile youngsters.)

what did we gain? A comprehensive display of principals and chorus, either squatting, sitting, leaping up and down, or edging sideways, or just making their entrances and exits.

But the refusal to identify any recognisable place was confusing, especially as the costumes and choreography veered between berlin cabaret, Broadway musical and, just occasionally, Spain. And the lighting was on the whole somewhat gloomy: the antithesis of Andalucía.

So far as I could judge (which is not all that far) the orchestra played well and singers sang well. The acting of the principals was impressive – especially the energy and elegance of the mezzo in the title role, who, though slender, seemed to grow in strength as the opera unfolded. The character was presented with an indifference to fate bordering on metaphysical insolence. This is a theme well-crowned with a theatrical coup at the very last: Carmen, stabbed to death by a jealous lover, gets up, still in character, and with a contemptuous shrug and curt hand gesture, dismisses the whole thing.

MSND at the ENO was produced with a similar idea about one simple dominant set.

Rather than a gloomy stadium terrace, we were shown a well-lit, gigantic, stage filling double bed (I write “double”, but only for actual giants).

The bed was in the old style – a bright green blanket, bright white fluffy pillows and bright white sheet turned back over the blanket. The bed was slightly angled up, thus giving (like the terracing) a rear horizon over which characters could appear and disappear.

In the second Act, the monolithic bed was de-composed into a dormitory of many normal sized beds, still in the same colour scheme, in or on which dozed, slept, or frolicked, or bounced, the variously bewitched, amorous, or merely Pucked.

What did this jolly visual conceit achieve? A huge pun on sleep and dreaming, which lies at the centre of the action; a vast expanse of green forest floor; soft sylvan “banks” on which to pillow oneself and rest; an intimate place for desire, mistaken, hoodwinked or, at last, correctly aimed.

The effect is charming, coherent with the action. The singing and music are ethereal and, say it, rather magical.

March 2018