OperaUpClose / Umsagnir

Six years on from its Olivier Award winning launch, this was the night OperaUpClose came of age. The company’s radical new Carmen is its strongest work to date: intelligently conceived, resourcefully designed and extraordinarily well sung. Director-translator Robin Norton-Hale jettisons Bizet’s notion of the sultry Spanish man-eater and presents Carmen as the innocent victim of loutish men’s base instincts. She makes her case so persuasively that you’ll never stop to question it; indeed you may wonder, as I did, how you ever saw the character in any other light.