Here is a short piece on ENO's critically mauled production of Carmen which I wrote for the Evening Standard's new 'Second Opinion' slot. It's not going to make the paper - my 'Second Opinion' being strikingly similar to Fiona Maddock's 'First Opinion' - so I publish it here:

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"AWFUL awful awful awful" muttered the gentleman to my left as Alice Coote's Carmen came back to life for the curtain call of ENO's season-opener. From where I was sitting, it was clear that Sally Potter's murky modern staging was no triumph. Clearer still, in the second half - most of the row in front left in the interval.

The Standard's critic, Fiona Maddocks, could only make a squawk of distress when I pressed her for an instant reaction; fortunately for our sub-editors, less fortunately for ENO, she had found words enough for Monday's paper: "No sexual energy, no cigarette factory, no smoke, no castanets, no Seville, no smut, no intensity". The pre-show blogging also came in for some mockery. Ouch.

I too found much that was incoherent and irritating about Potter's staging - I could not understand the decision to set the third act in a motorway service station.

But still, I rather enjoyed it. Shut your eyes, and there was little not to love; conductor Edward Gardner drew a seductive noise from the band (including, incidentally, some excellent castanet playing) while the singing was rich and clear throughout. Coote made the best of her miscasting as Carmen and the chorus was notably fine.

Conceptually? Visually? Well I must own that  Potter's good ideas made me smile more than the bad ones made me groan. At one point in the second act, in Lillas Pastia's neon-lit tranny bar (possibly borrowed from All About My Mother at the Old Vic) Carmen's security guard lover Don Jose is called back to work by a text. The device worked so well in context, it had me scratching my head to remember how Jose receives the message in traditional stagings (trumpets, apparently). The dilemma of the ensuing aria was viscerally felt - a tussle between impetuous abandonment and dull duty that had echoes beyond the immediate setting. I will grant that I felt this doubly given my own recent mobile wranglings and the theme of work weighing heavily on my mind, having spent the previous evening watching George Clooney in Michael Clayton, but generally, short of modern gimmickery, I found the loss of traditional Carmen motifs (fags, gypsies) was balanced by a psychological realism that is rarely effectively conveyed in opera. It may not be what opera - particularly something as elemental as Carmen - is supposed to convey, but it was powerful nonetheless. At least until that tedious third act, when the chasm between what the music says is happening and what the staging says is happening was wide indeed.

As for the Alsatian dog that appeared at the beginning of it and received a warm reception, sentimental fools that opera lovers tend to be, I chose to take him as an animal riff on the horse that Escamillo the toreador traditionally enters on. Again, in context, it fitted in well - and could even tentatively be taken as an acknowledgement that life, for ENO, is a bit of a bitch at the moment.