Not a simple reduction of Carmen by Georges Bizet, but a true rewriting by one of the great masters of twentieth-century theatre, Peter Brook. His aim is to bring an opera to life by stripping away all decorative elements, conventions, and the rhetoric typical of melodrama, and to dig deeply into the theatrical material to reach directly the stark, raw truth of a tragedy conceived in the ancient Greek sense. 
Compared to the original opera, the duration is halved, the choruses disappear, and the orchestra is reduced to twenty players; the order of the pieces is rearranged, and the characters—drawn from the novella by Prosper Mérimée—are reduced to the four principals, plus three non-singing roles. Indispensable numbers such as the Habanera or the Toreador’s Couplets here become part of an extremely tight dramaturgy that brings to light the darkest aspects within us. A cult production since its debut in 1981, La Tragédie de Carmen arrives at the Regio for the first time.