ROH's Carmen is worth battling through a beastly night

Opera Review:  Carmen at the Royal Opera House
Restaurant Review:  The Amphitheatre Restaurant at the Royal Opera House

The storm that ripped across southern England brought torrential rains and gusts of wind up to 100 mph. Trees and power lines were down, low lying areas were flooded and there was chaos on the rail lines.  "We advise against travel unless it's an emergency" ran the headline atop Southwest Trains' website.

Yet there we were, battling through the foul night to get to Basingstoke station and then to fight our way to London.  Why?  We had tickets to Carmen at the Royal Opera House.  I'd fight through wind, rain and flood for most ROH performances, if only to prevent the loss of a very expensive ticket.  But for Carmen, I'd amplify my effort.

This is probably the easiest of the grand operas; a fast-paced, exciting tale of lust, betrayal, criminal gangs and murder with a string of recognisable melodies and some gypsy dancers and bull fighters thrown in for visual interest.  I'd seen it many times on television, but never live.  There was no way, short of a complete collapse of the rail system, that I was going to miss this opportunity.  Thus, despite more than two hours of delayed travel in each direction, we made it.

It was worth the effort.

I suspect it's probably difficult for any professional to put on a bad Carmen; the material is just too good.  But this one hummed along, and presented the eponymous character in the most overtly sexual and devious way I've ever seen it played.

Grand opera is all written by men, but if any of the greatest hits had been written by a woman, it would have been this one.  Maybe Bizet had some special insight.  Because Carmen … especially as presented to us in this version … is actually the story of the stupidity of men, and of every woman's greatest fear: her perfectly normal, promising, lovely husband/brother/son gets sucked in and destroyed by a tawdry sexual predator.  Our hero, Don Jose, has to be the dumbest lug in all opera, throwing away a promising career and a perfectly lovely girlfriend for the promise of some really gritty sex.  Carmen, inevitably, gets tired of him and moves on.  He, in his desolation, murders her.

This close to Christmas, we got the second string cast, but they delivered the goods.  Christine Rice's Carmen is sexual in the extreme.  (I'm not sure I'd take my pre-teen daughter to this one.)  As she's seducing Jose, she hoists her skirts up, slides a rose across her nether regions and tosses it to the crumbling idiot.  How tacky! We scream to ourselves.  Don't be taken in! We groan.  But we watch with resignation as all the men on stage follow Carmen around in a blind, lusty lather.  Younghon Lee's Don Jose is the tragic focus of her interest for a while.  This young tenor's acting still needs work, but his voice is lovely.

The staging has all the traditional fun you'd expect, with flamenco-dancing gypsies, a donkey and Escamilo's sexy bullfighter coming in on a black stallion.

We see the tragedy approaching, of course, and know how it's going to end.  There's a sense of triumph when this Jose stabs this Carmen; she's a tawdry life-wrecker and deserves to die.  It's just a shame that the lovely but spineless Don Jose is going to hang for dispatching her.

After forming my own opinions, I checked out the review from The Guardian, which says the staging is tired and old fashioned and the portrayal of Carmen as home wrecker disappointingly outdated.  The revisionist staging, you see, has Carmen as an independent spirit, trapped by the male hierarchy embodied by the hopelessly traditional Don Jose.  Oh, please.  (Then again, I always come out as Sandy rather than Rizzo when I do that "which Grease character are you" quiz.)  I don't need modern or innovative when it comes to classic opera.  I like big, showy and traditional, and that's what the ROH delivered.

I thought they missed an opportunity with the food, however.  We booked into their formal restaurant, on the top level less than 100 yards from our seats.  This is not a deal, at £40 - £50 for three nice-but-average courses before you start on the drinks.  But it's incredibly convenient.

We were less than 5 minutes from our seats.  Even with the crazy delays, we managed to get starters and mains in before the production started and enjoyed dessert and coffee at the interval.  No fighting across a rainy, wind-swept Covent Garden from a pre-theatre restaurant, no scrambling for space in the crowds at the interval.  All terribly civilised, with staff who cater to your every need (a special chutney whipped up at short notice for the tomato-allergic Piers) and run things like clockwork to get you to your seat at the last minute.  This is the operatic equivalent of the premium airport lounge.

I wish the food were more more memorable.  Beetroot cured salmon with creme fraiche and pickle.  Fine.  Bream fillet with truffle butter.  Very good.  Cheese platter.  Perfectly presentable.  But nothing remarkable and, given what we were there to see, nothing Spanish.  The bars were serving tapas, but the restaurant had nothing topical.  Shame.

Still, on such a beastly night, it was worth the money to stay dry and be pampered.