Carmen, 2022
Opera Holland Park
Conductor: Lee Reynolds | Designer: takis | Lighting Designer: Johanne Jensen | Choreographer: Isabel Baquero
Cast: Kezia Bienek, Oliver Johnston, Alexander Robin Baker, Thomas Mole, Alison Langer, Natasha Agarwal, Ellie Edmonds, Jacob Phillips, Jevan McAuley, Themba Mvula, Mike Bradley, Opera Holland Park Chorus & Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School Children's Chorus
★★★★
“Opera Holland Park’s new production of Bizet’s opera may look the traditional 19th-century part – corsets and colourful gypsy skirts, flowers in the hair, uniforms with plenty of gold braid – but there’s a quiet seam of resistance running through it. Clichés are acknowledged before being delicately interrogated… The composer’s pleasure-seeking score doesn’t leave much room for moral ambiguity, swaying its hips and clicking its castanets every time things get complicated. But director Cecilia Stinton isn’t satisfied with that answer. Her Carmen wears the trousers – quite literally in the opening scene. Striding about the stage, Kezia Bienek is all about power, rather than sex. Her Habanera is less a come-on than a lead-on, a musical game at the expense of the men who surround her… Stinton isn’t trying to “solve” Carmen here: she’s cleverer than that. Her production asks timely questions, but doesn’t force the answers”.
Alexandra Coghlan, The Telegraph
★★★★
“Kezia Bienek is a charismatic Carmen at the mercy of Don José’s obsessive control in Cecilia Stinton’s cogent and pacey new production… It’s not often you come out of a production of Carmen feeling that the murdered heroine will be genuinely mourned. Stinton, a recent graduate of OHP’s Young Artists, gives us a Carmen who is the life and soul of her circle, radiating joy rather than lust”.
Erica Jeal, The Guardian
“Where Stinton’s rethink leaves its strongest impressions is not only in Bienek’s finely tuned, thoughtfully sung account of the iconical role — delivered without vocal roughness or dramatic cliché — but also in Johnston’s ability to suggest his character’s menace and propensity for the violence right from the start”.
George Hall, The Stage