It is hard to blow smoke rings with an electronic cigarette. Carmen, Bizet’s tale of toxic love between a flighty femme fatale and a mother’s boy with a murder record, used to play out on stage in a thick, blue haze of smoke. “Carmen, we can make a good girl of you yet,” sing the soldiers in Rory Bremner’s hiccupy English translation for Mid Wales Opera. As the e-cigs click into the spotless ashtrays in Lillas Pastia’s bar, you wonder if they haven’t already succeeded. Can a vamp with a vaporiser radiate danger? A blonde with killer legs, watchful eyes and a wonderfully elastic, expressive tone, Helen Sherman as Carmen certainly can.
Updated to the 1940s, Jonathan Miller’s staging suggests the heat and monotony of shifts at the Seville garrison and tobacco factory with insouciant ease. Stripped of touristic detail, the dances that course through Bizet’s score become more overtly sexual (choreography by Elaine Tyler-Hall), a quality amplified by Stephen McNeff’s reorchestration, with its piquant guitar figures. The only character to wear traditional dress is Nicholas Lester’s impressive toreador: a glittering, chisel-jawed prize for Carmen to enjoy before Leonel Pinheiro’s puddingy Don José ends their argument with a gun. Elin Pritchard’s anxious, obsessive Micaëla is better off without him.
Nicky Shaw’s clever designs are composed of a half-dozen faceless structures — a door, steps, a wall of blanked windows — and textured so as to change with the light: mustard by day, Gitanes-blue by night. With a cast of 14, every performer has a character and Bizet’s chorus writing is lent madrigalian transparency. The interplay between Moralès (Jan Capinski), Zuniga (Simon Wilding) and the other soldiers is a treat. Pleasing, too, to see a Carmen who enjoys the company of women, singing the first verse of the Habanera with her arms around the shoulders of Daisy Brown’s Frasquita and Marta Fontanals-Simmons’s Mércedès.
Now the negatives: under-rehearsal or unclear gestures from conductor Nicholas Cleobury saw some ragged entries from the 11 instrumentalists. McNeff’s reorchestration jolts between sound worlds: now Bizet, now Ravel, now Weill. Bremner’s translation is anachronistic, using argot unheard in the 1870s or the 1940s. The spoken dialogue features accents from Australian to Welsh to Portuguese. With two dozen more performances, there is time to finesse the infelicities. The basics are already in place.
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