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What Brook has produced is not Carmen, but a critical commentary on Carmen—an opera about an opera. In this he has succeeded. In the 550-seat Bouffes du Nord, the drama has more power than it possibly could in a 3,000-seat opera house. Brook has chosen his singers as much for their acting skills as for their voices. By tightening the plot he creates dramatic situations beyond anything envisioned by Bizet's librettists (Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy) or even by Mérim&233;e. In this version, Carmen and Micaela, Don José's girlfriend from back home, are direct rivals and have a real fight when Carmen carves a bloody cross on Micaela's forehead.
In a jealous rage Don José kills two men—his lieutenant Zuniga and Carmen's husband García (a character in Mérim&233;e's story). By the time Carmen's turn comes, he has nothing left to lose, no emotion to spend, and he plunges a knife into the kneeling woman's back as if he were an executioner doing his job. For her part, Carmen is an even more explicitly sexual creature than she is usually portrayed. She sings the famous Habanera while engaging in some erotic byplay with a cigar, thrusting it into Don José's mouth at the words "L'amour, I 'amour. " In its total bleakness this is Carmen seen by a man familiar with Alban Berg's operas Wozzeck and Lulu, twin 20th century masterpieces of love, alienation and despair. The production also reflects Brook's distaste for conventional Bizet, which goes back to the time, 30 years ago, when he was production chief at London's Royal Opera House. "I looked with horror at how it was being presented. It had become a mausoleum." Controversy is nothing new for the flamboyant British-born director. In 1949 he produced a scandalous Salome—largely because of bizarre sets by Surrealist Painter Salvador Dali. He has set Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in what resembled an abandoned squash court, with the actors flying about on trapezes. Earlier this year, he staged Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard with rugs as virtually the only props.
Brook defends his treatment of Carmen as something historically necessary: "Brick by brick, layer by layer, opera has been encased over the centuries to the point where today it is perhaps the most unnatural object in the whole of our society. To correct this, we must go back to the very roots of what the composer has in mind, to restore opera to its natural life."
But for all the production's dramatic effectiveness, it is to be hoped that Brook's Carmen will not be widely imitated. Would anyone think of touching up the Mono Lisa, redesigning St. Peter's or editing Paradise Lost? Opera is in many eyes a more suspect art form, and thus it is fair game. But composers usually know their own works, and later interpreters should look closely at the foundation before they start removing the bricks. —By Michael Walsh. Reported by William Blaylock/Paris