It is easy to understand the temptation: staging a new Carmen at Paris’s Opéra Comique, the very theatre that commissioned and premiered it in 1875, why not have the building itself, and its memories of Carmens past, play their own role in the action? The stumbling block comes when such a site-specific production ups sticks to an entirely new location. Ghosts, as everyone knows, don’t tend to travel well, and so the full resonance of Andreas Homoki’s time-shifting backstage Carmen fades once transplanted to Edinburgh’s Festival theatre.
If anything, an even heftier dose of meta-theatricality may have helped. The initial striking juxtaposition of a Don José in street clothes, a traditionally costumed Carmen, and a chorus of opera-goers straight from a Manet painting, sets up questions about objectification and the audience/performer divide which are never fully explored; and, while deliberately self-aware staginess (for which Franck Evin’s lighting design practically deserves its own character credit) is intriguing in the cabaret-style showstoppers, it is less effective when it comes to advancing the plot.
