How Bizet's Carmen became a male prostitute
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Version 0 of 1. The first time I listened to an opera I was sitting on the District Line. It was two years ago. I was on my way to Heathrow where I would take a plane to Cologne to spend four days with my friend and collaborator, the theatre director Sebastian Nübling, and to meet the mezzo-soprano Rinat Shaham. Music is the most important art form to me as a writer and as a human being. But classical music was not part of the culture I was born into. I was raised listening to 50s rock and roll in my Dad’s car, bought my first record aged seven and from the moment I discovered The Smiths and The Fall in the spring of 1984 when I was 13 I have consumed music with the energy of the obsessive. But I had never heard an opera before that tube journey. Sebastian first met Rinat when she took the title role in his 2007 production of Bizet’s opera Carmen. He became fascinated by her life. Since leaving Israel to train in the US and embark on her professional career around 15 years ago she has returned again and again to the part; it’s a role she has now sung over 40 times. He had a hunch that there may be a story worth telling in the life of an opera singer, and that this story might refract or reflect Bizet’s themes through a contemporary lens. He asked me if I wanted to write it. We spent four days interviewing Rinat, and the interviews yielded the material for my play Carmen Disruption which Nübling directed at the Hamburg Schauspielhaus last Spring, and which has its British premiere directed by Michael Longhurst at the Almeida theatre this week. Rinat’s observations on the nuances of the musicality of Bizet’s work were rich. Her candid descriptions of the politics and sexuality and loneliness of an international opera singer were felt and compassionate. Her description of her life in transit resonated. In the UK stage actors will rehearse for four or even five weeks. In Germany there can be as long as a two month-rehearsal period. But Rinat more often goes on stage after just 24 hours preparation. She flies into a new city and checks into a room she’s booked via Airbnb. She finds her way to the Opera House and meets the Assistant Director who talks her through the way in which this particular production has responded to the conventions of Bizet’s work. They tell her what she is to do with Carmen’s ring and her flower, and they might have a walk through the piece, but then she is on. Through this remarkable process she has come to know every moment of that rich, remarkable score. When I first saw the score in a rehearsal room, all 500 pages of it, my mind reeled. How Rinat was able to contain so much staggered me. How any human was able to imagine so much floored me. Rinat has also developed a fascinating association with this character she keeps returning to. She looks like an archetypal Carmen. Thick black curly hair falls over her shoulders and her eyes are alight with mischief. She has a committed faith in psychic communication and the inexorability of fate. I couldn’t tell whether she learnt such things from her character or whether her beliefs made the character resonate for her so deeply. She also has a fascination with the human drives for love and sexuality. Such drives define the politics of the opera world, she says. The blurring between the world on stage and the world off stage resonated with me. It resonated more when she talked about the dislocations of her international life. In a globalised world where all urban spaces reflect one another, where hotel rooms look the same wherever they are and all airport check-in lounges are identical surely it becomes increasingly difficult for this contemporary nomad to know which city she is even in any more. In the face of such uncertainty she may well be drawn to seek sanctuary and a sense of home in the virtual worlds of the internet. Skype conversations seem more real than actual conversations, the outsourcing of our memories to Google is comforting, and the avatars we create for ourselves on Twitter or Facebook seem more honest reflections of who we are than anything else. Rinat’s story fascinated me, not because it was so extraordinary, but because I recognised myself in it so deeply. Nobody is more likely to end a conversation in order to respond to the ping of an incoming email than I. Nobody has lost patience with wondering about something when Wikipedia can end my capacity to wonder as energetically as I have. Few people are made happier by Twitter than me. Hers was a story that I felt had theatrical potential. It strikes me that the theatre is one of the few remaining bastions of human experience. There are few other public places where we gather to sit next to strangers and stare in the same direction and with them share an actual live experience created in the same room that we are in. The theatre with its incumbent humanity seems the perfect place to explore the way in which we are losing our sense of humanity. The more I spoke to Rinat the more I remembered the experience of sitting on the District Line listening to the Bizet. The music moved me. At various times deeply familiar and also new and surprising it seemed to me to be an excavation of two themes I have returned to in my work: how do we continue to fall in love in a world torn by uncertainty and how do we live when we know that we die? Listening on my iPod I found myself staring at the people on the seats across the train from me. The music refracted their personas. The builder on his way to a site in his steel-capped boots and hi-vis vest was given the despair and neediness of Don José; the secretary down the carriage carried the fragility of Micaëla. And there was Carmen everywhere. The familiar haunting refrain of the Habanera sat under every commuter that morning. And all of them were looking at their iPhones. All of them were seeking sanctuary in the dehumanised virtual world, as Rinat does when she’s playing her Carmen. As I talked to Rinat I realised what I wanted to do. I wanted to tell the story of an opera singer who through years of travel and the dislocation of the virtual world was starting to lose any sense of where she ended and the opera began. All around her the people in the streets of an unnamed European city began to blur into the characters of the opera. I would write a contemporary Micaëla and a contemporary Don José. In my play Escamillo is a futures trader and Carmen is a male sex worker. Composer Simon Slater’s took Bizet’s score and resculpted it around my text, capturing the familiarity and oddity of the piece in a contemporary context. In language which is more poetic than I have written before, informed by the rhythms of Bizet’s music, I tried to tell the story of a singer who could no longer tell whether she was Carmen or whether she was herself. Not because this schizophrenia is what opera singers are experiencing but because it sometimes feels that this is what all of us are experiencing. Together I hope we capture a fraction of the sense of love and loss, emptiness and need that I saw on the District Line that morning as Bizet’s music played in my ears and I watched the people of this European city stare fixedly into the little black mirrors of their iPhones. Carmen Disruption is at the Almeida theatre, London from 10 April to 23 May. Details: www.almeida.co.uk/event/carmen-disruption |