More Grace Kelly than Grace Jones: Welsh National Opera’s Carmen reviewed

How do you take your Carmen? Sun-drenched exotic fantasy with a side order of castanets, or cool and gritty, sour with violence and politics? Jo Davies’s new production for Welsh National Opera seems unable to make up its mind. Sternly rejecting colour and fantasy, it then fails to commit to an alternative, leaving both its heroine and audience stranded in an unlovely theatrical no-man’s land.

Programme notes place us in contemporary Brazil, in a favela painted in unvarying textures of brown and steel. But there’s little in the action to confirm this. Who are the soldiers that guard the compound with desultory inefficiency, and what is their relationship to the women they wolf-whistle and the children who run riot around their feet? At the end of Act Two a banner unfurls proclaiming ‘Liberté’, but for whom or from what we never know.

Wire fencing traps us in a grubby tenement block whose courtyard must serve as barracks and bullring, mountains and Lillas Pastia’s bar. Leslie Travers’s designs are efficient and adaptable, but a world where gypsies and soldiers, officers and rogues all move interchangeably through the same landscape dissolves Carmen’s crucial outsider status and with it the transgressive frisson of her relationship with mummy’s boy manqué Don José.

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Carmen’s problems don’t end there. French mezzo Virginie Verrez sings the role beautifully, balancing darkness of tone and lightness of delivery for a really idiomatic ‘Habanera’ and deliciously skittish ‘Seguidilla’. But while the music says assertive seductress, the action is something else entirely. More Grace Kelly than Grace Jones, handling both guns and men like she’s afraid they might go off in her hands, Verrez is a convent girl at a riot — something the tattoos and hoop earrings and the shot glasses she defiantly clinks in place of castanets only emphasise.