‘Opera Singing Interrupted’: Simon Stephens’s Carmen Disruption

Simon Stephens’s Carmen Disruption (2014, Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg; 2015, Almeida Theatre, London) is a contemporary rewriting of Bizet’s Carmen, which depicts a day in the life of five individuals in an atomised urban landscape. This paper focuses on the formal and thematic disruptions that inform the play and imbue it with political resonance. I consider the play’s intertextual structure as the first and most evident of these disruptions, then go on to explore the disrupted representation of time and communication, addressing, finally, Stephens’s problematic engagement with the British realist tradition. The playwright’s poetics and previous works shed light on his systematic desecration of dramatic conventions, and allow us to read these disruptions both as a means of portraying contemporary alienation and, more importantly, as acts of creative transgression. Stephens’s reliance on dramatic empathy thus acquires significance as the most vital of these transgressions, encouraging the audience to transcend the isolation portrayed in the drama. I conclude by briefly considering possible controversies related to Stephens’s dramatic style, which seems, at times, to mimic the logic of consumer capitalism. This, I argue, serves not to validate the mechanisms of alienation but rather to bring them onstage, in order to catalyse a sociopetal movement within the audience, and return the contemporary individual’s predicament to a collective state.