Forget Prosper Merimee's small novel. Forget Georges Bizet's grand opera. La Cuadra de Sevilla here sets out to reclaim the legend of Carmen for her native Andalusia in all its folkloric austerity and flamboyance. With shrill bugles and sharp drums, with mellifluous guitars and the insistence of Flamenco dance, with narrators and interlocutors singing plaintively of a story much simpler than that best known in this part of the world, and even a splendid dancing horse to enliven her love affair with the picador mounted on the horse's back.
It is a very measured and formal affair here: the dancing, while it retains every ounce of its electricity and eroticism, is strictly constrained within the need to progress the narrative and Carmen's relationships with her fellow workers in the cigar factory, with the infatuated but stuffy Don Jose and with her picador on his horse. The singing is strong and generally unaccompanied and one yearns to understand the words. The music is now strident and then free-flowing yet always disciplined. The 24-strong band and the singers join the action as required but mostly stay on the periphery of the tale.
Lalo Tejada is everything one might expect of a genuinely Spanish Carmen: strong, playful, independent, and a superb dancer, as is El Mistel in the role of Don Jose Lizarrabengoa. The costumes are muted, women in brown men in shirt-sleeves, the band and the military in dull blues. The lighting is sharp white, dimmed to change the mood and the feel of the piece when necessary, and all entries and exits are made in an orderly fashion through a great rectangular arch in the centre upstage of a bare platform in which are set church bells occasionally rung to heighten the musical drama.
Conceived, researched and directed by Salvador Tavora, this is a piece of total theatre that Dublin could hardly have seen except in its theatre festival, and thanks are due to the festival organisers for bringing it in. But maybe they don't need the thanks given the huge satisfaction they have got from last night's prolonged, sustained, and ultimately standing ovation accorded rightly by the packed audience.
Runs nightly at 8 p.m. until Sunday, with 3 p.m. matinee on Saturday. The Theatre Festival booking number is (01) 874 8525.