©Zachary Walsh, 2010

On the first true summer day of 2010, the Holland Park Opera season opened surely the most famous of all: Bizet’s Carmen.


The sun-scorched earth of Seville and a tempestuous, impetuous gypsy spirit was transposed into the middle of a pretty park in Kensington. As the orchestra struck up the overture, full of tantalising snippets of well-known arias, the full London audience looked very happy indeed to travel to Andalucían Spain.


Carmen tells the story of a soldier, Don José, who falls in love with the titular character, while holding her prisoner. A seductress and a scrapper, Carmen is arrested for cutting the face of a girl she works with at the tobacco factory, yet charms her way free of her bonds before the Lieutenant can return with her arrest warrant.


Director Jonathan Munby and designer Emma Wee have created a pared back production shot through with the passion that drives its characters. A chorus dressed in sombre neutrals provide the backdrop for Tara Venditti‘s Carmen, her dress a streak of blood-red. Rose petals rain from the sky on her first entrance, embodying her freedom, beauty and sensuality – as well as her propensity to be blown about by the breeze, her mind and her direction changed on a whim.


In the famous Haberna of Act 1, Carmen sings that love is a bird, untameable. So, of course, is she. Don José wins her love yet is consumed by jealousy, fighting with his Lieutenant and ruining his army career. He therefore condemns himself to joining Carmen’s extended gypsy family and becoming an outlaw, further anguishing himself with the paradox between his commitment to his servitude and his new life as a bandit.

© Fritz Curzon, 2010

Tara Venditti as Carmen and Seán Ruane as Don José



The sun set around the ingenious white canvases enveloping the theatre, opening Act 3 with crepuscular gloom as the gypsies creep on with dim lanterns, smuggling contraband across the border. The simple wooden stage accrued a fire and a pile of boxes – the contraband – and convincingly became the dry and rocky hills of a smuggler’s camp.


Sean Ruane’s beleaguered Don José skirts perilously close to desperation: Carmen has bored of him and flaunts her inclusion in a plan to seduce the customs officials at the border. He is left alone to guard the goods and thus meets Escamillo, the toreador, who has heard that Carmen tires of her latest conquest and has come to try and seduce her.


Don José attacks the toreador with a knife – it is Carmen’s intervention that saves his life. Virginal Micaela arrives, an orphan taken in by Don José’s mother, and begs him to return to his dying mother’s bedside. Carmen mocks him and sends him away, but he promises her they will meet again.


They do, of course, and violent, jealous Don José next encounters his wild, unpredictable Carmen alongside her new love, Escamillo, in the final scene, already full of the passion and drama the reunion promises: a bullfight. As strains of the spectacular Toreador Song are hinted at by the orchestra, Don José demands whether Carmen loves him. She does not. He threatens and cajoles her, but she insists that she was born free and she will die free. Die she does, and the chorus comprising the bullfight audience walk slowly across the front of the stage to encapsulate the ex-lovers as Don José stabs Carmen to death. 


Escamillo defeats the bull offstage, his victory and glory lauded by the enraptured crowd. Don José defeats Carmen onstage, his desperation and powerlessness in the face of her freedom driving him to her murder. She dies amidst another cloud of rose petals, untamed to the end.


The transportation from Kensington to Seville is beautifully rendered. Small anchors to reality remain: a goose quacking earnestly, a plane overhead, the odd glitch of the surtitles leaving those without spoken French none the wiser to what was said or sung. But any clout given to such distractions would be churlish, and none is given.


The most enthusiastic applause of the night is reserved for Julia Sporsen’s pure and earnest Micaela, the wonderful baritone of David Stephenson’s toreador Escamillo and naturally, Carmen, Tara Venditti seducing the crowd as well as her character’s bountiful lovers, despite suffering from a cold.


The Holland Park Opera endeavours to bring classics and more obscure productions to a diverse audience. The price of tickets ranges from £10 to £57 and concessions are available, as well as schemes to provide free tickets in some circumstances.


The park offers an attractive and novel venue to experience opera and the company promise an exciting and vibrant performance to match.


Carmen runs until June 19th. Details of the 2010 season can be found in a previous feature, here