Simon Stephens’s strange and beautiful play re-imagines Bizet’s opera Carmen and the possibility of love in a fractured urban world.
Olivier-Award-winner Simon Stephens is one of Britain’s best-loved playwrights. The author of more than twenty stage plays, including Punk Rock, Port, Three Kingdoms and Pornography, as well as the celebrated adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, he is a former tutor on the Royal Court Young Writers Programme. Awards include the Pearson Award for Best New Play, 2001, for Port; Olivier Award for Best New Play for On the Shore of the Wide World, 2005; Best Foreign Playwright, as voted by German critics in Theater Heute's annual poll, 2007; the Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland for Best New Play, 2008 for Pornography; and the Olivier Award for Best New Play, 2013, for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
Simon Stephens' radical, fractured response to Bizet's famous opera
. . . These are lonely souls, yearning for love, home, a sense of
self and real connection in an age of superficial digital
communication and narcissistic, illusory identities. How did we get
from the passion and beauty of "L'amour est un ouiseau rebelle" to
the arid twitterings of social media? Stephen evinces a timely
sense of a modern malaise.
*Daily Telegraph*
Stephens reimagines characters from Bizet's opera as avatars of
current concerns about the saminess of the world cities in which we
walk around wedded to our iPhones, together but alone. . . . Above
all, Stephens gets his varied characters' need for something more
solid than an iPhone to hold on to as they carry out their Skyped
love affairs, nine-figure business transactions, unaccompanied
nights at the opera. . . . fascinating.
*The Times*
Simon Stephens's extraordinary new play is less a recreation of the
opera than a deconstruction of it, reflecting on the strangeness of
a singer's vagabond life, our frantic dependence on social media
and the increasing homogeneity of modern European cities. It is a
crowded work, but a totally compelling one. . . . Stephens uses the
framework of the opera to explore the fragmented isolation of
modern life. . . . in Stephens's world, loneliness is accompanied
by a helpless reliance on social media and new technology.
*Guardian*
Stephens's writing has rarely felt sharper
*Evening Standard*
Stephens writes with his usual harsh, chaotic beauty
*Time Out London*
. . . along comes Simon Stephens's "Carmen Disruption" to, well,
disrupt whatever notions you may have about the well-made play.
Elusive and fractured in its storytelling and often quite ravishing
to behold, Mr. Stephens's new play uses Bizet's opera as the
starting point for his own portrait of anomie as it besets a
handful of people . . . Mr. Stephens co-opts his classical source
only to deconstruct it as his play marches to its own distinctly
mournful and haunting beat. . . . in its ability to locate the high
drama that exists within all our lives, "Carmen Disruption," for
all its gathering sadness, gets the last laugh.
*International New York Times*
Playwright Simon Stephens - whose stage adaptation of The Curious
Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has become this hard-hitting
writer's best known work - does a sterling job in justifying yet
another.
*Jewish Chronicle*
Some plays make you feel the power of art in bringing people
together: Simon Stephens's latest ostentatiously insists we notice
what keeps us apart. The playwright uses broken shards of Bizet's
opera to fashion a mosaic of monologues about our infatuation with
technology and digital communication.
*Sunday Times*
. . . a true response to a great work. . . . Carmen Disruption will
go on reverberating, not because it beguiles but because it is so
3D dramatic. It is a depth charge to the theatre.
*Observer*
It's all deeply felt, darkly realised
*Mail on Sunday*
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