“If you love me, then beware.” When Kezia Bienek sings the last line of Carmen’s Habanera at Opera Holland Park she has her eyebrow decidedly arched: by that point it’s not herself she’s really singing about, but her own myth. In Cecilia Stinton’s new production it’s the myth of Carmen that the soldiers have become infatuated by, not the real woman – at first they aren’t even sure they recognise exactly which of the women she is. To her friends, however, she’s very real indeed: it’s not often you come out of a production of Carmen feeling that the murdered heroine will be genuinely mourned.
How to put all Bizet’s glorious tunes on stage without presenting the audience with a reliquary of tired devil-woman cliches is a challenge each director must negotiate. Stinton, a recent graduate of OHP’s Young Artists, gives us a Carmen who is the life and soul of her circle, radiating joy rather than lust – and, for the most part, this interpretation works. Carmen’s choice of Oliver Johnston’s initially gormless Don José from among the slightly Dad’s Army-ish ranks is still initially baffling, but when they are alone in act two things gain focus. There’s an explosion of violent anger from Don José, but immediately afterwards Johnston shapes his burly tenor into a beautifully gentle Flower Song, and Bienek’s Carmen is, for the first time, visibly at a loss. More clearly than usual, her murder is the result of his controlling obsessiveness: look what you made me do.
