Jonathan Miller's ENO production of Carmen was deemed by many to be an awkward effort when it first appeared in 1995. I missed it when it was new and can't say whether time has been kind to it, though it strikes me as still inherently flawed and dogged by a peculiar lack of focus.
Miller's decision to avoid the horrid trappings of tourist brochure Spain is admirable: the opera was, after all, deemed brutal and obscene rather than exotic and glitzy when premiered in 1875. What is worrying, however, is his transposition of the work to the grubby years surrounding the Spanish civil war, saddling it with a surface political gloss that it can't quite take and that isn't coherently thought through. José seemingly goes awol from Franco's army. The smugglers are got up as partisans. Carmen, kitted out in leather coat and beret, looks at one point like a resistance fighter.
The problem is compounded with a certain fussiness, and a level of dispassion that at times becomes dangerous. Bizet is, in many respects, opera's answer to Racine, sparse in utterance and employing a pared-down musico-dramatic language in which every note and gesture speaks volumes. Miller swamps the opera's unblinking clarity with overloaded detail, allotting each member of the chorus a sharply defined character, which frequently pulls your attention away from the principals. Miller also distances himself from the work's eroticism, seeing Carmen as an opera about sex rather than as genuinely sexy. It needs, of course, to be both to succeed.
This is a shame, for musically the evening is superb. The chief honours lie with the conductor, Vassily Sinaisky, who unleashes a torrent of emotion and lets the opera's terrible games of sex and death unfold with an outstanding, uncompromising vividness. His Carmen is Louise Winter, who has Ava Gardner looks and a superlatively voluptuous tone, though she occasionally overloads the innuendoes by forcing her voice in its lower registers. John Hudson is equally impressive as José, employing a formidable range of dynamics and vocal colouring to form a compelling portrait of emotional disintegration. Susannah Glanville's Micaela, lustrously sung, is the embodiment of the toughness of moral rectitude. Ashley Holland's Escamillo doesn't quite have the charisma, though vocally he's unfailingly exciting. The whole left me with very mixed feelings - though the best of it is unquestionably very impressive indeed.
• In rep until March 24. Box office: 020-7632 8300.
