EXCERPT: "Carmen Disruption encompasses everything about the theatre that makes it such a thrilling art form. I haven't come out of the theatre so excited about what the form could do for ages. It has every ingredient: story, character, visual spectacle, metaphor, emotion, impact - and, crucially, makes you want to connect up the dots while you're watching, and dissect it when you finish it."
Summary
In the
opulent grandeur of a European city, a renowned singer abandons the opera
house for the truth of the streets. A gorgeous prostitute. A tough-talking taxi
driver. A global trader. A teenage dreamer. Everyone’s looking for
something.
Simon Stephens’ strange and beautiful new play reimagines
Bizet’s opera Carmen and the possibility of love in a
fractured urban world.
Thoughts
I thought Carmen Disruption was absolutely stunning. It's not necessarily the first recommendation I'd make for someone who doesn't go to the theatre lots, but it encompasses everything about the theatre that makes it such a thrilling art form. I haven't come out of the theatre so excited about what the form could do for ages.
It has every ingredient: story, character, visual spectacle, metaphor, emotion, impact - and, crucially, makes you want to connect up the dots while you're watching, and dissect it when you finish it. I didn't want it to end because I kept wanting more clues, more opportunities to work out what I thought about it.
At the core of my enthusiasm is my love for Simon Stephens' writing - like Birdland, this is a masterpiece of metaphor mixed with fabulous storytelling, leaving you wanting more and feeling like the more time you spend with the play the more you will get out of it. The intelligence behind the writing is palpable and manifests itself in multiple ways.
The language is wonderfully un-self-consciously poetic and vivid whilst feeling totally natural and modern - I particularly loved the monologue by the gay rent boy Carmen, which was fabulous with its casual narcissism.
Most impressive though is that the thrust of the piece's purpose is so insightful and meaningful (and that's just the meaning I took from it - I feel like many people could mine it for many different things). To my mind, what it's all about is this: it dramatically shows us why and how the story and opera of Carmen is relevant today. The play's final message confirmed my sense of this. With beautiful irony, we read lines that say that someone's heart can be ripped apart by the uttering of a few words, which are really only shapes, and that these can be sung. I'm paraphrasing, and badly, but it is a way to explain why it is that Carmen the opera can be so powerfully effective. The fact the story still resonates many years later is explicated dramatically in a different way too: the various stories we follow all show the ways that the Carmen story can be refigured and reexamined in a modern day context. With each story though, the links to the original are figured slightly differently. Whether it's through the rent boy Carmen who is betrayed by his customer coming inside him; or by seeing the actress playing Carmen lose sense of herself and become consumed by her part; or the young girl whose cyber relationship with an older man has both viewing it in totally different terms that destroys both her and the relationship; or by the two men who have subordinated their love for one another for the more traditional heterosexual marital set ups; or the love born of debt to another; in each instance each story refigures the traditional love struggle and shows people's isolation. The next layer to the production is that each relationship is set within a distinctly modern urban and technological world - their relationships and sense of their selves totally influenced by their technological interactions. And the links between these stories - both to one another and that of Carmen the opera - is heightened by the geographical proximity to one another and way that their stories are all very much bound up in the performance of Carmen that is meant to go on that night.
Michael Longhurst's direction is supremely brilliant. Not since Chimerica or Curious Incident or Matilda have I seen directing complement and enhance the text so well. He makes the play cohesive, dramatic and visually interesting and interrogatory. Each story works on its own and there isn't so much stage business as to be distracting, but - with total use of Lizzie Clachan's fabulously wonderful set design - he brings the various plot strands together so we never see the stories as stand alone but are rather always making ourselves assess them in relation to one another and the central Carmen story. That he manages to do this whilst simultaneously enforcing sufficient narrative and substance to each person's individual journey (who have partly been individualised by the different ways each tells their stories - the young girl constantly circling and on the move, the financial guy often sedentary, etc) is a real feat. My only issue is with the cab driver's story - it never hung together as well or as compellingly as the others did.
This play encompasses everything I loved about studying literature - that the more you examine it the more you get from it - but within a theatrical setting that makes the interrogative process wholly joyful. I am fully tempted to give this five stars, but the fact that I would probably need to see the play multiple times to mine it for all its worth does hint at a slightly over-populated core that is ultimately a bit problematic.
It has every ingredient: story, character, visual spectacle, metaphor, emotion, impact - and, crucially, makes you want to connect up the dots while you're watching, and dissect it when you finish it. I didn't want it to end because I kept wanting more clues, more opportunities to work out what I thought about it.
At the core of my enthusiasm is my love for Simon Stephens' writing - like Birdland, this is a masterpiece of metaphor mixed with fabulous storytelling, leaving you wanting more and feeling like the more time you spend with the play the more you will get out of it. The intelligence behind the writing is palpable and manifests itself in multiple ways.
The language is wonderfully un-self-consciously poetic and vivid whilst feeling totally natural and modern - I particularly loved the monologue by the gay rent boy Carmen, which was fabulous with its casual narcissism.
Most impressive though is that the thrust of the piece's purpose is so insightful and meaningful (and that's just the meaning I took from it - I feel like many people could mine it for many different things). To my mind, what it's all about is this: it dramatically shows us why and how the story and opera of Carmen is relevant today. The play's final message confirmed my sense of this. With beautiful irony, we read lines that say that someone's heart can be ripped apart by the uttering of a few words, which are really only shapes, and that these can be sung. I'm paraphrasing, and badly, but it is a way to explain why it is that Carmen the opera can be so powerfully effective. The fact the story still resonates many years later is explicated dramatically in a different way too: the various stories we follow all show the ways that the Carmen story can be refigured and reexamined in a modern day context. With each story though, the links to the original are figured slightly differently. Whether it's through the rent boy Carmen who is betrayed by his customer coming inside him; or by seeing the actress playing Carmen lose sense of herself and become consumed by her part; or the young girl whose cyber relationship with an older man has both viewing it in totally different terms that destroys both her and the relationship; or by the two men who have subordinated their love for one another for the more traditional heterosexual marital set ups; or the love born of debt to another; in each instance each story refigures the traditional love struggle and shows people's isolation. The next layer to the production is that each relationship is set within a distinctly modern urban and technological world - their relationships and sense of their selves totally influenced by their technological interactions. And the links between these stories - both to one another and that of Carmen the opera - is heightened by the geographical proximity to one another and way that their stories are all very much bound up in the performance of Carmen that is meant to go on that night.
Michael Longhurst's direction is supremely brilliant. Not since Chimerica or Curious Incident or Matilda have I seen directing complement and enhance the text so well. He makes the play cohesive, dramatic and visually interesting and interrogatory. Each story works on its own and there isn't so much stage business as to be distracting, but - with total use of Lizzie Clachan's fabulously wonderful set design - he brings the various plot strands together so we never see the stories as stand alone but are rather always making ourselves assess them in relation to one another and the central Carmen story. That he manages to do this whilst simultaneously enforcing sufficient narrative and substance to each person's individual journey (who have partly been individualised by the different ways each tells their stories - the young girl constantly circling and on the move, the financial guy often sedentary, etc) is a real feat. My only issue is with the cab driver's story - it never hung together as well or as compellingly as the others did.
This play encompasses everything I loved about studying literature - that the more you examine it the more you get from it - but within a theatrical setting that makes the interrogative process wholly joyful. I am fully tempted to give this five stars, but the fact that I would probably need to see the play multiple times to mine it for all its worth does hint at a slightly over-populated core that is ultimately a bit problematic.
No comments:
Post a Comment