The opera season at ENO began with a new production of Carmen. It was an occasion so dispiriting that I’ve been toying with the idea that the management had decided on provoking a mass act of critical suicide in order to solve the seemingly endless crisis that the house has been in for several years, with one decent production being forgotten in the welter of catastrophes, either in choice of repertoire or execution or both. Carmen can seem to be a work that is too well known, but only inside a fairly hermetic fraternity, not to the whole theatre-going world, and it is the latter to which ENO is now addressing itself.
Opera is the most difficult to produce of all performance arts, the one which is least tolerant of amateurism. What do we find, over and over again, but a film director with no previous experience of opera launching his or her career in that form with a work in all ways as tricky as Carmen? Sally Potter, ‘acclaimed film-maker’, has a blog, extensively quoted in the programme, from which we learn how she prepared herself for this strenuous task. To continue, ‘The production features a major dance element and reignites Sally Potter’s partnership with master exponent of the tango and Tango Lesson co-star, Pablo Veron.’ One senses a drifting irrelevance already, a kind of vapid free association. The blog: ‘From a dramatic point of view tango is about relationship: unity and polarity; a language of intimacy that can resemble a fight (to paraphrase Borges, the great Argentinian writer)’ — thanks. So Potter went off to Spain, and watched a bullfight, ‘in order to understand and unravel the opera, we had to experience what it was really like’, something from which ‘we merged [merged?] shaking and shaken.
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