Carmen live in the open from Sydney Harbour in the Australian summer? Not the most natural of marriages of work and venue, and the tight-in filming and lighting give you little sense of location. It’s all most professionally laid out on the setting – a raked circle of a large bullring floor with a blood-red circumference – by director Gale Edwards and choreographer Kelley Abbey.

Given the physical circumstances of the production and the popular nature of its appeal, the changes made to the opera itself are logical and mostly effective. They occur in the dialogues (it’s the recit version), the recits themselves (they’re heavily cut, too much so in the case of understanding who José actually is), the urchins’ Act 1 chorus and the entire character of Lillas Pastia (both cut), and the vendor-less scene outside the Act 4 bullring (a change of lyrics to talk of ‘dancing’). The orchestra sounds moderately sized and rather distantly placed, although Brian Castles-Onion is creditably together with his performers, literally and atmospherically. Nor, with an attractively helter-skelter smugglers’ quintet and a massively slow verse from Carmen in the card scene, is his interpretation an anonymous one.

The cast (visibly miked) have obviously been chosen for their ability to work in this kind of space. Popov wouldn’t win any French elocution prizes and Jones has the odd unsteadiness in Escamillo’s weirdly written role but they’re both good at filling the space. Shaham and Car are both strong vocally, although characterisation does not go much beyond presenting them, tout court, as vamp and mummy’s girl next door. The smugglers and their ‘chicks’ Frasquita and Mercédès look and act like a rock group. The soldiers have been updated to at least the Civil War Franco guardia civil period. Abbey manages to work a credibly Spanish-looking dance into the start of the Act 2 Chanson bohème and has choreographed each of the entr’actes (Act 4 best of all) in a manner not dissimilar to Calixto Bieito’s two European productions of the opera. This works, is good entertainment for the punters and ups the Spanish theatrical experience.

The Sydney Carmen was clearly a tightly run ship, quite a triumph in the physical circumstances. So this performance is essentially sui generis – even if its real, simple merits wouldn’t win ‘best of’ in the face of competition from, say, the Bieito production (C Major from the Liceu), the Eyre (DG from the Metropolitan) or the McVicar (Opus Arte, Glyndebourne).