For Londoners who want the country-house opera experience without having to leave the city, Opera Holland Park has the answer. There, on a summer evening, you can sit under canvas in a temporary theatre with indifferent acoustics and watch opera with all the comforting, intrusive noises you expect from experiences of this kind. The sound of peacocks provides a stately touch, the serried ranks of municipal plantings a reminder of the gardens at Garsington, and the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has even thoughtfully hired an usher of surpassing rudeness to keep you firmly in your place.
The OHP programme has grown steadily over the past 10 years, and there are five operas in the repertory this time. The first is Carmen, directed by Jamie Hayes, with John Gibbons conducting the "Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Holland Park" (whatever that is). The production has the eccentricity of true country-house opera, too: it is sung in variable French with surtitles that are illegible most of the time, but the dialogue is delivered in English and made to sound more like Salad Days than Bizet's earthy exchanges.
Gentility undermines the whole show, for genteel is one thing Carmen is not. Hayes has updated it and exported it to what looks like Latin America: there's a broken-down jeep on stage and the soldiers look like a raggle-taggle militia. But though designer Will Bowen has been punctilious in his references to Spanish culture (cigarette ads, bullfight posters), not one person looks anything other than indelibly English. The budget might manage champagne and canapés in the interval for the great and good, but it clearly doesn't run to wigs.
Buried under all this were some very decent performances from a young cast. Carmen herself, Louise Innes, may look more like a Sloane than a gypsy, but she sang the role with fine-grained tone and supple phrasing. Geraint Dodd's Don José was equally proficient, while Nicholas Garrett's sharp-suited Escamillo brought the requisite swagger to his solos, despite resembling a television presenter rather than a bullfighter. There were fine contributions too from Caroline Childe's Micaela, Nicholas Todorovic's Zuniga and Mark Cunningham's Remendado.
In another context, with a more energised conductor than Gibbons, things could have been very much better.
Until June 23. Box office: 020-7602 7856.
