Carmen - 5 out of 5 stars State Opera South Australia TICKETS:  https://www.stateopera.com.au/productions/2026/carmen Nearly 150 years after its premiere, Georges Bizet’s Carmen comes with a lot of baggage. Laura Hansford has succeeded in bringing a fresh eye to this classic without feeling the need to reinvent it for a modern audience. Instead, she trusts us to recognise the universal themes of love, jealousy, freedom, sex and violence while setting the opera in 1820s Seville, as Bizet intended. It’s a welcome addition to the growing movement to stage operas in their original settings, rather than teleporting them to the modern era for the sake of audience understanding. Audiences are smarter than we often give them credit for, and the reason these works continue to resonate is that their composers and storytellers were clever enough to distil a story down to its universal truths. Hansford's interpretation finds plenty of contemporary relevance in the original setting, particula...