Michael Hunt's Co- Opera, launched last year with La traviata, has chosen as its second production the even more popular Carmen. This, however, is a Carmen with a difference. Not because Hunt and his designers (Alison Nalder, sets, Madeleine Fry, costumes) have updated the action to 1930s South America, but because they chose in tandem with that change to commission a "tango" arrangement of the orchestral part for a small ensemble with accordion.
The difficulty with this Carmen lies not with the ideas, which are all very fine in themselves, but if you're going to go for a presentation with so many angles of realism, it had better be plausible. And most of it is not. From Karen England, we get all the cliches of a slutty Carmen: the come-ons, the hip-swinging, the skirt-lifting, the legs apart stance. The impression is that if this is a woman who knows her own value, that value is low.
England's Carmen is not the only characterisation that seriously mis-fires. Roisin Toal's Micaela comes across as mother superior unsympathetic, and Craig Downes's Don Jose (the strongest voice in the cast) as the sort of wimp no Carmen would think twice about. With limited acting skills across the board, the other characters misfire in various ways, too.
The tango version (by Rob Lane and Simon Whiteside) veers between arrangement (they add clearly 20th-century parts to provide the spice of tango) and simpler transcription where no tango flavour beyond the accordion is suggested. Andrew Synnott handled it all with typical sensitivity, but it was a mixed blessing, really, as at times it managed to cast Bizet's original in an unnecessarily sentimental light.
