From brazen hussy to feminist role model, Communist orator to bisexual mechanic - can Carmen really be reinvented yet again? Calixto Bieito, director of Opera Ireland's version, thinks so, he tells a Carmen-weary Arminta Wallace
Does the world really need another production of Bizet's Carmen? We've seen it play out again and again, this torrid tale of love and death under a blistering southern sun, its music so wearily familiar it could fill up an entire "Greatest Opera Hits In The World - Ever!" selection all by itself: the Habanera, the Seguidilla, the Flower Song, the March of the Toreadors.
It has been done in enormous stadia with hordes of flamenco dancers and, sometimes, horses. It has been infused with political meanings of every conceivable hue: in pre- perestroika Moscow, the heroine was played as a Polish Jew who was stabbed to death after delivering a fiery panegyric on Communism. It has been reconstructed and deconstructed and there is - I kid you not - a dance interpretation called The Car Man, in which the cigarette factory girls are replaced by a garage-ful of muscular men in dungarees, and the sultry heroine becomes a bisexual drifter who seduces both a fellow-mechanic and the wife of the garage owner.
I haven't seen Matthew Bourne's ballet. The Car Man may well be, probably is, a brilliant work of art and a witty post-modern comment on the dangers of sexual stereotyping. But hey, if it's necessary to go to such lengths to infuse a tired old tale with dramatic immediacy, isn't it time to admit that Carmen has been done to death?
Opera Ireland certainly doesn't think so. For its spring season, it has imported a production by the Catalan director, Calixto Bieito, first seen at the Festival Castell de Peralada in 1999 and subsequently at Opera Zuid in Maastricht. This is the man whose interpretation of Valle-Inclán's Barbaric Comedies provoked a storm at the Edinburgh Festival, not to mention the Abbey Theatre, in the year 2000 - so it's probably safe to assume that his Carmen won't be a whirl of castanet-clicking and red frilly frocks. Still, this is also the company that has, over the past three years, pulled off a hat-trick of superb nights at the opera by putting on shows never seen in Ireland before: an unforgettable Boris Godunov, a heart- stopping Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and that rarest of rare operatic jewels, a brand-new opera, Mark-Anthony Turnage's The Silver Tassie. Another production of Carmen just isn't in the same league: it's like offering John Grisham to a John Updike fan.
Perhaps the oddest thing about Carmen's perpetual popularity is that the opera only narrowly escaped being strangled at birth by that monster of French public life, the industrial dispute. When Bizet unveiled his spanking new score in the early days of 1875 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, the gentlemen and women of the chorus narrowed their eyes, shrugged their Gallic shoulders and declared their intention to strike. But, monsieur, they complained, we must smoke; we must quarrel; we must come on stage in twos and threes instead of all at once; eet ees impossible!
The orchestra, meanwhile, was busily rejecting parts of the score as unplayable - and the respectable bourgeois folk who made up the audience were not at all sure they wanted to get close up and personal with the plot of Prosper Mérimée's novella, which, though highly admired in literary circles, was regarded as too immoral for the stage.
When, after a torrid two-month rehearsal period, Carmen finally opened, reactions were cool and the piece died in the water. Bizet himself died shortly afterwards, and it was only when his friend, Ernest Guiraud, replaced the opera's passages of spoken dialogue with sung recitatives that the piece began its irresistible rise to the top of the opera pops.
Bizet's mellifluous melodies, and a score which has been held out to wannabe opera composers as a model of ingenuity and originality, played no little part in this popular success - but it is, arguably, that immoral plot which grabbed the public imagination and never let go. Peel away the bullfighting and the gypsy choruses and you have the mother of all bodice-rippers: a soldier, Don José, abandons military duty and Micaëla, the girl next door, to follow Carmen into the wilderness, only to be dumped when she turns her attentions to toreador-superstar Escamillo, leaving José with no option but to kill the thing he loves. Or, as Q magazine memorably put it: "Torrid gypsy femme fatale in ultra-tuneful Iberian love triangle."
Restore the bullfighting and the gypsy choruses, of course, and you have the ultimate tourist opera, "Sevilla Mantilla", every Spanish cliché in the book all packaged up and topped with a big red-and-black bow. Never mind that Don José is one of the wettest characters ever to grace the opera stage, or that a poor production of Carmen is one of the longest nights of theatre you'll ever be unfortunate enough to live through - Bizet's bestseller is guaranteed to put bums on seats, time after time after time.
So, all together now, hands on hips and here we go again: "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle" - and so on and so on. It was bad enough when Carmen was simply a brazen hussy and a careless heartbreaker, red rose tucked behind her ear. Now that she has become an icon of independent womanhood in a figure-hugging black vest, she is never - ever - going to go away. The interpretation of Carmen as feminist role model has been gathering a head of steam ever since the Spanish soprano Teresa Berganza declared that singing the role inspired her to leave her husband in the late 1970s. In the mid-1990s, Franco Zeffirelli plumbed the plot's Freudian depths and, in the process, made a megastar of the young American singer, Denyce Graves. Having grown up on the really rotten side of the tracks in the black ghettoes of Washington DC, Graves understood the sort of genuine social deprivation which underlies Bizet's flamboyant yarn. But even she professed herself a little puzzled by the convoluted psychology Zeffirelli applied to her role: "After agreeing that neither of us much cares for Habanera, which he called 'a musical theatre number', and for which everyone has their own idea about how it should be sung," she told an interviewer afterwards, "Franco added that he thought it a very cynical song.
"In the next breath, he asked if I thought of Carmen as a happy woman. I replied that I did. But he went on to say that he thinks of her as a very unhappy woman. I was astounded! I never imagined Carmen as unhappy, but as a carefree spirit who prized and wanted freedom above all.
"Franco replied that this was precisely the reason for her unhappiness, because what she fears most is loss of freedom, the loss of control that goes hand in hand with being in love. He added that, in his view, Carmen is desperately in love with Don José. But because of this fear she tries to make herself as terrible as possible in his eyes."
He might more profitably have asked the question nobody ever asks: what on Earth does she see in him?
On a slightly blurry phone line from Spain, Calixto Bieito chortles at the very idea that his forthcoming production for Opera Ireland might be a traditional kind of Carmen. For a start, he has relocated the action to the Moroccan city of Tangier. "After all, Seville is not really the south," he says.
Not that "the south" is a geographical concept. "In this sense, it means a dangerous place, a state of mind maybe. The characters are all on the border, on the edge; they know they will die. And they are on the edge of society too, these characters - I think this is the first opera where the characters are very, very marginal, and I love this kind of emotion."
His production will, he promises, be all heat, dust and old Mercedes cars; a world in which everybody has a smuggler mindset, breaking the law and going against the norm. "The piece is about that anyway," he says. "For me, the production is not about the myth of Carmen. I'm not really interested in that."
But will it be as controversial as Barbaric Comedies or his production of Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera, which has caused a few shivers at English National Opera? He laughs. "I don't know. I try to do some thing fresh. I feel like, like Puyol, or Billy Wilder. You must do everything you want, but not be boring. I would like my production to provoke in the audience primitive feelings. They are not coming to see the traditional Carmen. No - they are coming to see a new thing."
Carmen, directed by Calixto Bieito, conducted by David Heusel and designed by Alfons Flores, opens at the Gaiety Theatre on April 19th. The role of Carmen will be sung by Patricia Fernandez, with Emil Ivanov as Don José, Peter Edelmann as Escamillo and Franzita Whelan as Micaëla