Bizet’s Carmen is a mashup of male-fantasy sexual encounters. She needs reinventing

The Gypsy heroine is an impossible, exotic male fantasy who is not one woman, but many. Her murder matters less than it should, argues opera director Mathilde López

Directing Carmen is terrifying. First, you must overcome the opera’s huge fame and the expectations of audiences in order to carve yourself some space to think. Then you have to work out who she is – while unpacking the misogyny and sporadic dashes of exotic Gypsy colour that pervade the story.

I am a French woman from a mainly Spanish family with some Gypsy origins. My great-grandmother was a Gypsy woman from AAndalucía who was taken away from her family by a Frenchman - to Morocco. She danced flamenco and never stopped making music on the kitchen pots. Theoretically, this should give me an “in” on who Carmen is. But my first attempts at thinking about the piece needed no French, Spanish or Gypsy DNA.

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