The Clothes Unmake the Opera: A Review of Costume Design in Carmen at the Royal Stockholm Opera House

           Costumes serve as a balancing force on stage, they provide a focus point for the audience, and enhance or underscore scenes with texture and color. Costume choices, whether intentional or unintentional, elicit certain emotions in the audience. Every costume on stage is crucial in molding the audience’s experience of the play. Costumes can focus the audience’s gaze; they can aid the actor’s process. If everyone on stage is wearing black, except for a primary character wearing a searing red, the audience’s focus will be jerked onto that primary character. If all the characters are dressed in 18^th century garb, then the audience knows to expect certain types of behavior from them. On the other hand, if the costumes of the characters on stage lack any obviously unifying theme, the audience becomes confused as to how they are meant to receive or relate to the characters, or even who they are supposed to focus on. This unfortunately was the case for the majority of the performance of Carmen at the Royal Stockholm Opera House. The inconsistency of the costume design for the female ensemble members, which spanned time-periods, color schemes, costume brands, and textures, left the audience to fend for themselves.

 At the beginning of the play, all of the female ensemble members wore a blue coat over their outfits. In a truly incredibly act of ambiguity, the costume designer managed to find a coat that was indistinguishable as a medical lab coat, a trench coat or a bathrobe. It was an enigma to the audience whether these women were factory workers, women of the night, or simply women on the street. And while the use of a monochromatic costume piece could have been effective in unifying the ensemble, the costume designer did not have the women keep their trench coats closed, revealing their outfits underneath from the get go, and confusing the color spectrum. When they finally threw off their coats in unison at the climax of a song in Act II, the effect was muted for the audience, since their outfits had been visible from the get-go. But more than that, the female costumes transgressed very basic rules of costume design. In the world of costume design there are four primary brands of costumes: historical, fantastical, dance and modern. In order to create a cohesive and intelligible experience for the audience, generally a costume designer will choose one- maybe two- of these categories within which to design the costumes of the play. The costumes in the female ensemble alone, however, spanned all four categories, and invented some more in the process. It seemed as fellow opera goer Clementine Jacoby commented, that not only had the costume designer not coordinated the outfits, but that he/she had simply sent all the female-ensemble members home and urged them to come back wearing whatever made them feel prettiest- be that a mid length hot red skirt reminiscent of the 1950’s or a short skirt with printed images of space and the cosmos, that one might see on the thighs of a thirteen year old school girl in 2015. Nothing about the costumes of the most visually present actors in the show was synced, leading to a visual smorgasbord more evocative of a plain-clothes dress rehearsal, than a coherent operatic production. 

***Due concerns about disrupting fellow opera goers behind and around me, I was unable to take photographs.