What a delight Creating Carmen is – theatre and music combined beautifully at OSO Arts Centre
“Just what have you got to hide”
Creating Carmen has saddled itself with the portmanteau ‘concertplay’, a unwieldly term that does little to convey the excitement and exhilaration that is better suggested by its own definition – ‘where music and theatre collide’. Clare Norburn’s wryly amusing meta-drama sits alongside and is infused and informed by a suite of Spanish-inspired music, performed with tremendous flair by the ensemble CarmenCo.
It’s a creative way of presenting the material, one of those occasions where the sum truly is greater than the parts, even as good as those parts are. Norburn’s play gives us a writer struggling with his latest novella: that writer is Prosper Mérimée and the novella Carmen (which would later be adapted into the iconic opera). Bereft of inspiration, in struts Carmen herself with her trio of musicians, determined to get her story told.
In this hazy fantasia of Mérimée’s psyche, Suzanne Ahmet’s Carmen is a marvellous creation. From the confident flamenco struts to the spritzes of perfume to herald her arrival to the outrageous flirting with the audience (I’ve never been so jealous of a Harold), she’s a titanic figure battling hard against the stereotypical and misogynistic tendencies of her creator. Hungry for a complex, nuanced story to reflect her complex, nuanced self, she also reflects Mérimée’s artistic intent back on himself, probing with some psychological depth into what he’s really trying to say.
Niall Ashdown’s Mérimée is amusingly done, baffled by these intrusions into his world and equally determined to wrestle control of the narrative back, even as he secretly welcomes this disruption to his writing process. He’s perhaps just a touch Anglo for a Parisian writing about a gitana but that actually suits his patriarchally wry manner and his growing willingness to actually listen to Carmen (and her music).
Crucially in Nicholas Renton’s production for The Telling, CarmenCo’s musical contributions are treated just as equally as the drama. Naturally there’s extracts from Bizet’s opera, alongside the running joke that he would have been 7 at the time, but there’s also music from Manuel de Falla, Joaquín Rodrigo, Francisco Tárrega and more, conjuring up heady evocations of Carmen’s homeland.
Emily Andrews on flute, violin plus captivating mezzo, and David Massey and Francisco Correa on classical guitar bring both fluidity and intensity to their performance, seamlessly integrated back and forth so that there’s no sense that this concertplay could be done another way. Isaac Albéniz’s Córdoba is a phenomenal example of the guitar-playing, Andrews’ ‘Card aria’ a vocal highlight.