At the premiere of the Lyriki Skini’s production of Carmen, which officially opened the Athens Festival on July 9, those who expected a Carmen sashaying about as a gypsy tart and a Don Jose in a ragged dragoon’s uniform doubled up in a state of unslakable satyriasis were in for a considerable surprise. Director Peter Busse, Dimitri Horafas, musical director of the Lyriki Skini, and costumes and set designer Nikos Petropoulos concocted a Carmen as it truly is -a masterpiece of the late opera comique style. That is to say it was colourful, entertaining, witty, satirical, often lighthearted, serious and tragic when necessary, but always sophisticated, realistic and elegant.
The approach was apparent from the moment the lights went up. Far from finding ourselves on a dusty square mone of Seville’s less desirable residential districts, we were located in a fashionable piazza pleasantly overlooking tiled roofs. (How one gets the effect of looking over Seville from the Odion of Heredes Atticus is a question I hope all future set designers will ask Mr. Petropoulos as he is about the first person to achieve on that heavy Roman facade a third dimension which is all depth and light.) The soldiers quartered at stage right were clearly recruited from Andalusia’s best families; the cafe just off centre was a kind of neighbourhood Floca’s; and while there is industry in the area (stage left) devoted to the manufacture of cigarettes, it must be producing something like ‘Mores’.
It was clear from her entrance that Alicia Nafe’s Carmen had given up smoking, although she developed her character carefully and subtly so that it only became rounded as the opera unfolded. That her heart was not in cigarette manufacturing was obvious halfway through the Habanera, and though she danced cabaret with castanets very well indeed, in the second act, this was clearly just another moonlighting activity. It was only in the third act as she led about seventy-five smugglers through the Sierra Nevadas that we discovered she was really into the hot stuff and one of Andalusia’s top ‘connections’.
Men, of course, amuse Carmen, but usually she has a specific purpose in mind. Don Jose is a soldier who can be of help: having a member of the law-and-order department in the contraband business is simply practical and Escamillo, being a big star in the Seville entertainment world, is obviously capable of favours. But Alicia Nafe saved the final revelation of Carmen’s character for the last act. Here the three great portals of Heredes Atticus brilliantly lit from behind disclosed an arena which is sold-out. Don Jose stands menacingly at the central portal. Now it is quite clear from the staging that she can pass through either side portal without hazard, but she is determined to enter only through the central portal. It is equally clear that she deliberately provokes Don Jose to pull out his switch-blade. Usually the scene is directed so that Carmen tries to elude Don Jose who then stabs her in the back. Nafe marched straight onto the knife, onto her own fate which she herself commands-much as we might imagine the bull receiving the c.oup de grace from the toreador. Thus the flamboyance, the impetuousity and the fatalism of the character (like the opera) is brought together in a moment of defiance, the victim not of an impersonal fate but of one expressed through an overwhelming act of will.
If the acting was generally good, the evening was vocally hardly better than average. Nafe Jacked sufficient volume in the first two acts and her voice was forced in the last two. Her Seguidilla towards the end of the first act, however, had a rich and sultry glow to it. Neither Guy Chauvet nor Vassilis Yannoulakos have the freshest of voices though Chavet gave Don Jose an expressive tragic dignity to the final scenes, and Yannoulakos played Escamillo with that self-conscious pomposity which Bizet so precisely describes in the music.
As a production, it was a truly memorable Carmen for which director Peter Busse deserves great praise for consistency and forcefulness.
