Carmen Disruption, Almeida Theatre, London - review

In Simon Stephens' version of the classic opera tale, Carmen is a self-regarding gigolo (Jack Farthing) prowling through an anonymous European city. Carmen is also the role taken by a singer (Sharon Small) visiting the city's opera, so dislocated by her globetrotting lifestyle that her life is marshalled by her smartphone. And costumed as Carmen is Romanian-born mezzo-soprano Viktoria Vizin, who comments on the other characters through Bizet arias fractured and reconstructed by Simon Slater and played by two onstage cellists.

These are not the only characters onstage: Don Jose is now a cab driver (Noma Dumezweni, quietly powerful as ever); Escamillo, a dodgy city trader; and Micaela, a student jilted by her lecturer-lover. Nor is Bizet the only musical source: recorded snatches range from Roy Orbison to Kraftwerk and Sonic Youth.

We enter the auditorium through a mini-installation backstage, past a life-size bull that lies centre stage throughout, almost dead but visibly still breathing. Refracted and re-ordered words flash up on an LED display. There is a vast amount going on in Stephens' script and Michael Longhurst's production. But what do these 100 minutes add up to?

Stephens' current output ranges from comparatively straightforward adaptations of established works (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ) to elliptical dramas (Wastwater , Morning ) which he encourages directors to make their own. Carmen Disruption takes the former strain as its jumping-off point, but its spirit is distinctly in the latter. (It premiered in Hamburg last year under Stephens' favoured director-provocateur Sebastian Nubling.)

The crucial question with such work is always whether individual ideas coalesce through the staging into a cogent whole, or whether we are left with isolated moments of insight and a generalised impression that the piece is impressive simply because of its ostentatious unconventionality.

In the end, Carmen Disruption does find coherence as a collective portrait of modern European urban life: the city, for instance, is unidentified not because it could be anywhere, but because nowadays anywhere could as easily be anywhere else. We make our own self-centred narratives, seldom connecting, just as no character here speaks to another onstage. But it is a close judgment call between weighty theatre and unorthodox spectacle as an end in itself.

almeida.co.uk

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