‘A woman of deep courage and life and vitality who is struggling against the system for her freedom and will scale anything for that,” is how US director Diane Paulus describes Carmen in a programme interview for her new staging of Bizet’s masterpiece.
The production, which opens this year’s Glyndebourne festival and dominates it with a season-long, double-cast run is an uneven piece of theatre, unsubtle and in-your-face where Bizet, one of opera’s great realists, is complex and probing, and at times curiously passionless for a work that can still present enormous challenges in its depiction of the irrational nature of desire.
