CARMEN • STUTTGART OPERA
★★★☆☆☆
Photo: Martin Sigmund
REVIEW NÜBLING’S CARMEN: PRIVATE PARTY IN STUTTGART
Barrie Kosky has done it. Calixto Bieito has done it. But Sebastian Nübling’s Carmen at the Staatsoper Stuttgart is still considered by many hardcore opera aficionados to be the most striking, modern interpretation of Bizet’s classic.
Instead of Spanish folklore and colorful clichés, Nübling creates a cool, feminist chamber play in which Carmen is a strong, freedom-seeking woman and Don José a loser, ravaged by possessive love.
Photo: Martin Sigmund
The production, which premiered in 2006 and has since become a signature production in Stuttgart, reads the work as a journey into the subconscious of a murderer – a drama about control, aggression and mental breakdown.
Already in the overture, a flashforward is established, completely out of sync with the music: a broken Don José in his miserable, dilapidated home. He sits in his undershirt in front of a television, where an all-seeing Big Brother-like eye watches him and gives the scene a surrealistic touch that could have been borrowed from Salvador Dalí.
Photo: Martin Sigmund
Behind him, a clown-like green figure named Surplus moves around like a projection of Don José’s mental state in a kind of parallel dimension. In front of him on the floor lies the dead Carmen in an elegant silver glitter dress.
Surplus is Don José’s evil side: wearing long-nosed clown shoes, a rubbery green leotard with a pot belly, and a red clown nose both on his nose and in his crotch. A Nübling invention that gives the entire production a bizarre, circus-like and disturbing feel – as if David Lynch had been involved. One asks oneself: What is actually going on?
Photo: Martin Sigmund
Critics have called this Carmen both brilliant and timeless, and the current revival, to which I have just been invited, has been received with the same enthusiasm as at the premiere. This is quite astonishing, considering that the production is so complicated to decipher that for long periods it resembles nothing so much as a closed party.
Photo: Martin Sigmund
Nothing is as you know it. Nübling completely demythologizes Carmen and leaves the drama as an intense, human confrontation—without Andalusian folklore and without political markers. The production hits directly into a time focused on violations, power, gender, and violence. No flamenco, no bullfighting, no colorful costumes.
Photo: Martin Sigmund
In practice, the performance ends up as a Freudian therapy study that closes in on its own self-understanding. The result is a Carmen in which the opera as a dramatic and musical experience almost disappears, because everything must be examined and understood through Don José’s destructive psyche.
Barrie Kosky’s version also messes with the engine room, but his Carmen (the one with the blue gorilla) is a spectacular meta-show that opens up new perspectives without shutting down the work. Koskys Carmen is an alpha female of her time, mischievous, playful, seductive, unreasonable, unfaithful, feminine, masculine, free – modern.
On a huge staircase, which constitutes the entire set design, large-scale song and dance numbers unfold, tied together by a silky smooth narrative voice. The show’s grand finale is a true Kosky climax with the entire gigantic ensemble on stage, including an unforgettable chorus line of wonderfully dancing, swaggering toreadors in brightly colored bullfighter outfits.
Calixto Bieito depicts the Carmen story with raw realism, sexuality, and violence. He cuts the tragedy to the bone and lets the coldness and cynicism unfold without any charter holiday aesthetics. What remains is a worn-out telephone booth, a flagpole and a platoon of brutal, testosterone-fuelled police soldiers from the Franco era who assault anything that has a pulse.
The whole thing has an atmosphere of naked, unplugged rawness with strong stage images – such as when Carmen’s dirty smuggler friends roll onto the stage in six retro Mercedes cars filled with contraband. Bieito gets close to the work’s social and gender-based power structures, but the opera itself is clearly present.
Nübling is one of Germany’s most prominent directors in both theater and opera and is known for his uncompromising approach to his material. His Carmen has become a somewhat one-sided psychoanalysis of Don José’s mental collapse.
I often reward daring opera interpretations, but in this case, I am left with the feeling that the opera itself has disappeared into the concept. It gets three stars from GOT TO SEE THIS
