Carmen Disruption review, Almeida Theatre

Carmen is a fairly straightforward story - sexy wild gypsy girl has fight, soldier boyfriend takes the rap, returns to find her seducing his boss, loses his rag, cue lots of bad stuff, murder, and a dead bull. Having merely seen Carmen on stage twice (walking out on a third occasion, which was the painful Sally Potter production at The Coliseum) I'm no expert, but expected to make sense of Simon Stephens' associated play, Carmen Disruption. Not so. I emerged in a state of pleasant befuddlement from a piece which features five separate and very different characters managing dark and complex modern lives in an unknown city, while a rather scary Carmen strides the stage oozing oestrogen and cleavage and singing odd snatches with bared teeth.

The lack of story (and music) is good news for those who feared ignorance of the opera might affect enjoyment of Carmen Disruption. What we get is interesting, intriguing, and challenging individuals: a taxi driver who abandoned her children for love, a rent boy abused by his client, a banker who's gambled everything on corned beef, a student rejected by her 63-year-old lecturer/lover, and a singer who can't remember her roles. The dialogue is flinty, funny, and explicit, particularly the banker and the rent boy. The taxi driver and student are deeply moving. There is confusion, though, with the singer who can't remember her role, which is Carmen, and the Carmen who is wandering round singing snatches of Carmen, and the rent boy who's called Carmen. The relevance of the homages including the bull (see below) eluded me. Moving swiftly on...

The Almeida under Rupert Goold's management has become a 4D space and the auditorium for Carmen Disruption is reconfigured under Michael Longhurst's direction, as an opera house. The bench seats have been replaced at the front with ancient red velvet singles, the house is decorated with red velvet wall lamps and seating boxes that look like sleighs, and we pass the dressing room and navigate our way around a large, dead, bull lying centre stage, to get to our seats. It's great fun.

In conclusion: I enjoyed Carmen Disruption because of the language and the performances and the staging. Fans of clear, linear, narratives however, may bore of the characters' singularity and bleakness, and the insufficient pull-together at the end. The cast is John Light, Katie West, Jack Farthing, Noma Dumezweni, Sharon Small and Viktoria Vizin.

References
Carmen Disruption, Tickets
Photograph from almeida.co.uk