Unmoved by emotion: Carmen for everybody and nobody at the Holland Festival

This is not Carmen. “Carmen is an opera and this is not an opera and you can leave at any time,” intoned an actor moving chairs around in Moved By The Motion’s hybrid offering for the Holland Festival. Sadly, I couldn’t take him up on his offer for two reasons: one, I was there at your service, dear reader, and two, I was almost sitting on the stage and I’m afraid I believe, in an old fashioned way, that the audience ought not to interrupt.

Director Wu Tsang may think differently about that. Her bizarre meta-work, originally commissioned by Schauspielhaus Zürich, is all about breaking ties with convention. Thematically inspired by the story Bizet set to music, this Carmen promises to “find the layers” in the original. Traditionalists will point out that this used to be the job of the score, but (brace, brace) that was opera and opera is boring, and so here we ought to be with something more interesting than one of the most fiery love triangles of the form, not to mention one of its most red-blooded heroines. The good news is that the additional music by Andrew Yee and Yasma Maroof explores the Andalusian setting in a sound world that is (when not unremarkable) sometimes beguiling and occasionally genuinely moving – the final birdsong section really is beautiful and redemptive. However, for the most part there are snatches of underpowered Bizet from behind a curtain, miles of extraneous text, and an overall infirmity of purpose that means the whole thing serves about as much dramatic tension as a vegan bullfight. 

The story has developed from the one you might recognise. An irritating PhD student is intent on finding a mass grave that is the final repose of a freedom fighter. Why? It’s blindingly obvious from the start but I’ll pretend it isn’t for the sake of a narrative arc (as I said, I am old-fashioned). The student’s supervisor refuses funding, at which the student shouts ‘beetohloneyemtenfried!’ Unfortunately there were no supertitles for this English part of the dizzyingly multi-lingual production but it has nothing to do with Carmen at all unless you’d worked out, in the first ten seconds of this particular actress’ strangulated hernia of a performance, that Carmen is that very freedom fighter now mercifully interred.

One down, two to go. Yes, there is not one but three gypsy queens in this production. Gurning Carmen (think Golem in red velvet), smoking (in both senses) non-binary Carmen and singing Carmen. Singing Carmen, French mezzo Katia Ledoux, whose voluptuous voice I’d like to hear without amplification, finds herself in a more recognisable situation in terms of the story and does a decent job in the circumstances, those circumstances being a deeply unconvincing lover who is lip-synching – sometimes very badly – to a tenor in the shadows. This may be another way of breaking down traditional hierarchies of basic stagecraft or it may be that Don José lost his voice at the last minute. There was no information on that. As you’ll have already gathered, interpretation was all.

And so to the question of hierarchy, by which I mean the decision-making process that results in a coherent story. By all means challenge Aristotle’s basic tenets for tragedy and find a new way to tell an old story, though it’s worth mentioning that those basic tenets have lasted pretty well and, if nothing else, serve as an organising principle around which disparate elements of an artistic collaboration can coalesce. You’d have to ask a more informed classicist about the pricing structures for theatre tickets in classical antiquity, but one simple rule ought to be that an audience paying to see a professional production ought to get one. There are far too many cast members in this show who can’t act, can’t deliver text, can’t sing and definitely can’t dance, though they can all smoke a great deal, which begs the question why the tedious aforementioned PhD project couldn’t have been financed by big tobacco. There are also Germans in trenchcoats – I don’t know why. They do some shouting, walk about a bit, and leave. 

Bizet died shortly after the premiere of what he would never know would become one of the most popular operatic stories of all time. A tragedy, but, as the PhD student opined from her rock three hours in “We all die in the end”. Indeed we do, though some of us more than once.