Felicity Buckland and Nick Morris in Carmen
(Picture: Steve Gregson)Opera has many ways of killing off its tragic heroines. The French critic Catherine Clément catalogued a few: “Nine by knife, two of them suicides; three by fire; two who jump; two consumptives; three who drown” – the list goes on. Clément continued, “The most feminist, the most stubborn of these dead women” was Bizet’s Carmen but, inevitably, “this woman who says ‘no’ will die too”, stabbed by her jealous lover Don José.
In Bizet’s 1875 original, she dies at a bullring in Seville. In Baseless Fabric’s production for Grimeborn, Dalston’s annual opera festival, things turn out differently. Gone is the opera house orchestra, replaced by a trio of bassoon, violin and accordion (“music by Leo Geyer after Georges Bizet”, the programme says). The original lasts nearly three hours; this version, directed by Joanna Turner, who also provides a new text, clocks in at just 45 minutes, and is sung in English, not French.
