Could do better

As part of its reopening season the Royal Festival Hall is staging a month-long run of Carmen Jones, the 1943 musical by Oscar Hammerstein II adapted from Bizet’s Carmen. The show is far more successful than the production of Sweeney Todd which preceded it, partly because a fair amount of progress has been made with the amplification system, though not enough. Now almost all the words are intelligible, but there is still the problem of the sound coming from huge speakers suspended above the stage, and therefore de-locating voices. It took me some time to find where the character whispering an intimate line was, among the moderately dense crowd thronging the perimeter of the stage, with the London Philharmonic in the middle. That may not be remediable, but it remains the great objection to amplification, since if voices aren’t heard as emerging from a body we can see in a particular place, the whole drama, the interaction, is ruined.