Damiano Michieletto's 2024 staging, already on its second revival at the Royal Opera House, relocates Bizet's opera to Franco's Spain — and the choice pays dividends. The oppressive police presence, the sun-baked nowhere-landscape, the smugglers' reflexive antiestablishment energy: it all coheres. Paolo Fantin's Hopper-esque buildings and Alessandro Carletti's torrid lighting create a claustrophobia that the drama genuinely needs. Carmen here isn't a free spirit so much as the only person in the room with any forward momentum, almost willing the tragedy into existence because at least it's something happening. The Franco-era relocation is shrewder than it first appears. Sexual violence in Carmen can read as decorative if a director isn't careful; Michieletto grounds it instead in emotional immaturity, boredom, and heat — a pressure cooker that eventually blows rather than a set-piece eruption. That psychological realism is this production's strongest card, and it holds even when Carla Teti's gaudy 1970s costuming strains credulity (smugglers this visible would be arrested on sight). The problems are real and worth naming. The device of Don José's mother appearing as a symbol of fate is deployed too frequently and too literally — and the question of why only Carmen can see her is never answered in a way that earns the ambiguity. Worse is the parade of children through the entr'actes: comedic, charming in isolation, but increasingly dissonant against the onstage brutality as the evening progresses, and it costs Bizet's most elegant transitional music the weight it deserves. Dan Dooner's revival feels rougher than the staging probably was in its first outing — blocking occasionally loses its purpose, and the spark between Carmen and Don José takes too long to ignite. None of that matters much once you fix on Ginger Costa-Jackson. Her Carmen is an emotional powder keg — smouldering, frequently raging, mounting in frustration — and the voice stays dark and velvety through all of it, with a lower register that lands like a battering ram. The performance doesn't play Carmen as a victim of fate or a symbol of freedom; it plays her as someone trapped in a province that can't contain her, whose destruction is as much the consequence of that containment as of any individual cruelty. Russell Thomas's Don José produces a thrilling stream of sound and rises to an electrifying final scene, though earlier the production hamstrings him — asking him to deliver The Flower Song to a literal brick wall is a staging choice that extinguishes chemistry rather than building it. Adriana González brings real vocal appeal and careful phrasing to a Micaëla that Michieletto renders mousey and myopic — a deliberately unglamorous reading that pays off in the final confrontation. Alexander Vinogradov swaggers through the toreador with neon-suited panache. Sesto Quatrini's conducting starts lively and grows bolder across the evening; the chorus and children sing well. The production's arithmetic still comes out in Costa-Jackson's favour. Carmen runs at the Royal Opera House until 21 November.
