Carmen, Opera UpClose, Soho Theatre, review: ' problematic'

Opera UpClose, the no—frills pub theatre outfit that has never quite managed to cap its huge initial success with La Bohème in 2009, has moved to the Soho Theatre for a new production of Bizet’s Carmen, rather insipidly directed but crisply translated by Robin Norton-Hale.

The venue is certainly a vast improvement on Opera UpClose’s previous base in a black hole at the rear of the King’s Head in Islington, but it’s still far too small for classically trained voices and opera’s high emotional temperature.

So instead of sounding intimately real and immediate, everything seemed phonily over-projected – this despite draconian cuts which reduce the running time to two hours and a re-orchestration by Harry Blake for piano, violin, cello and flute reminiscent of something you might have heard on the dais in a Lyons Corner House..

Even more problematic is a staging – notionally set somewhere in contemporary Latin America – which announces itself in a programme note as focused on the idea of Carmen as “a victim of an escalating cycle of abuse”, but which fails to deliver either on that dubious claim or any other ideological flash-point. The acting just isn’t good enough for one thing.

There’s not a glimmer here of Carmen as the doomed outsider, scarily different from the other girls, mysterious and alluring, predatory and dangerous, and neither do we sense José’s decline from decent ordinary bloke into half-crazed monomaniac. There’s no intensity, no violence, no sex, no transgression.

Lilly Papaioannou offers a sweet, pleasant and even mezzo, but her polite Home Counties manner is pure Kate Middleton, while Michael Bracegirdle, sturdy if charmless of tone, seems the same dour character at the end as he does at the beginning.

The supporting cast is adequate in the circumstances, its quality lifted by Roisin Walsh’s shining and shapely account of Micaela’s Act 3 aria, and Christopher Hone’s designs, executed on a minimal budget, are sensible.

But the net effect is simply to drain the piece of its incandescent power: unlike Peter Brook’s similarly pared-down La Tragédie du Carmen, it never reinvents the piece or brings it freshly alive.It’s brutal of me to say so, but the idea that performances of this sort will communicate the visceral thrill of opera to new or younger audiences is pure wishful thinking.

Box office: 020 7478 1000, sohotheatre.com. Until 19 September