Unlike Goethe’s Faust, which gets regular translations into English and is still widely studied, Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen belongs to the canon of operas based on romantic novellas that no one nowadays has ever really read – works like John Luther Long’s Madame Butterfly or Scènes de la Vie de Bohème by Henri Murger. In the original novella, Don José is a gambler, thief and vicious thug who has killed and will kill again, in particular despatching Carmen’s husband in a knife fight, before marrying her himself. A relationship ripe for exploration and reassessment then, and the focus of John Bell’s colourful, energetic and largely successful new staging for Opera Australia – their third production of Carmen in as many years.

As in many of his successful Shakespeare stagings, Bell has opted for a contemporary setting, in this case a country something like (but not exactly) Cuba. Although that gives him access to mod cons like Michaëla’s carry-on hand luggage and plenty of cell phones, the retro atmosphere of a city like Havana means he can offer sops to the ‘modern staging averse’ with plenty of nods to timeless fashion and furnishings.

In this he’s ably abetted by Michael Scott-Mitchell’s monumental plaza,...