My tiny following on this site who remember me from days at the National Times (1780s) and the Sydney Morning Herald (1890s), must be wondering when is James going to bust – and put the boot in. Relax back in your rockers and wheelchairs, make sure you’ve taken your heart tablets etc. Just kidding…

One reason why I’ve moved, in this third incarnation, from straight up reviewing to the ‘e-pistle’ form is because it spares me, for the most part, from having to go in for the kill: from being obliged to commit murder, for the good of art, when faced with something truly revolting. Post-menopausal, I no longer have it in me to wrestle with bad art as if it were an escaped alligator.

Secondly, my main job these days is interviewing eminent Australians for the National Library of Australia. After some years working in the other subject areas, I am currently involved in documenting the memories (what’s left of them) of senior theatre artists. I can’t afford to undermine relationships to an extent that someone special will not talk to me.

For example, since I have spoken fairly highly of her of late I will choose this example, risky though it may be. Imagine my chances of interviewing Robyn Nevin, now she has retired from leadership of the Sydney Theatre Company, if I had reviewed at full strength the recent Don DeLillo play, Love Lies Bleeding, which featured Nevin alongside Max Cullen, Benjamin Winspear and Paula Arundel. Nevin’s performance was fine, but I do look forward to her working, later this year, with a director at least as strong as her. In September she will be performing alongside Melita Jurisic, in a version of Euripides The Women of Troy, to be directed by Barrie Kosky.

I am impressed that Nevin has agreed to step up to the plate and undergo the Kosky treatment. It did wonders for John Bell in King Lear. Though I hope Kosky does not scream in her face from only a few inches away, as I believe he did to some of the NIDA students in The Lost Echo. In which instance he should not be surprised to receive an almighty swipe.

I have been around long enough to know, in most cases, if a dodgy theatrical experience lies firstly with the text or the director. Whatever director Lee Lewis might not have achieved, I could not see anything of interest in the DeLillo play. He is a brilliant novelist and I place his White Noise among my most admired reads.

But why on earth were we watching an ex-wife and a son turning up to convince a new wife to join forces and euthanize some grumpy, useless old bugger who can’t speak any more and is pretty much dead anyway. In another writer’s hands, maybe. But, in this case, with a potentially key scene missing - where the new wife concedes to the plan – all we end up with is watching the characters ever-so slowly drip-feed morphine to the once-talented prick. Where is the heroin hot-shot when needed? We'd have been out of the theatre in a mere 15 minutes.

What I missed out on, in not writing about that production, was a chance to describe the spectre of horror that seized me some way through: that all of us in the audience were also about to die.

I should explain that I attended a Saturday matinee, and many in the audience were frail and elderly, relatively close to death themselves. Some of us just have weak hearts. Did we enjoy witnessing loved ones conjoining to put this old bugger down? Okay it was Max Cullen, but dramaturgically, casting is beside the point. As the elderly sucked ever more desperately on lollies, you sensed many in the audience contemplating their own fate. As Bernard Shaw once sagely noted, "Where there's a will, there's a family!"

And the time it took. So tedious was the production that I was jolted to the possibility that we too were being drip-fed morphine in the form of ‘deadly theatre’. Imagine a whole matinee audience discovered slumped in their seats  at the end of the show. It would have made a rousing leader for the evening news. Pinching myself when the lights came up, I took the  opportunity to look around the audience in case we had lost, perhaps, even one or two of the more frail. 

Was the Australian Opera’s Carmen even more deadly? I can’t say because I left at interval. And though some of you may choose to draw conclusions from my early departure, you're not allowed. Convention has it that I have breached my contract with the work and, without having lived (or passed away) through the second half, I am - for ethical reasons - rendered silent for the rest of time.

The Australia Opera does some great work, occasionally, but for me this was not one of them. It is so driven by the established expectations of a well-heeled subscriber base - who pay to see their own reality and value system reinforced. Which means: no rocking the boat. And hey heck I'm tired, I've worked my arse off on the bourse, my wife has dagged me here - so keep it nice and lite!

Some are more forgiving than myself. I once met a tiny little lady in her 80's in New York City, Edith Oliver. She had been reviewing 'Off Broadway' for the New Yorker for 50 years. She revealed she had never walked out of a show, not once. “I always find something to look at,” she explained. No wonder she held that job for so long, when you imagine some of the stuff she must have had to sit through. I wish I found it that easy. And it may not be the fault of the show - it may be just something that does not work for me.

The truth is, I made a mistake taking on this assignment. I went, less for the work itself (corny) or the singing (no one particularly famous), but because Francesca Zambella was directing. From a theatrical point of view, her previous production for the AO, of Shostokovish's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, in 2002, was dazzlingly bold. That is a very serious opera, and her rendition of it was both radical and rivetting. So I wanted to see what Zambella would do with Bizet's Carmen, which is basically a crap, creaky melodrama with some very famous tunes. What tricks would she pull out of her directorial hat to drag it into contemporary times? And further enhance her reputation.

For reasons I cannot even begin to imagine Zambella has gone the other way. Her interpretation is so enthusiastically old-hat, for most of the first half, I waited for the whole thing to be turned on its head as some sort of exotic party joke.

That Zambella is a sexy lesbian had also led me to wondering in advance how she would interpret the endless misogynistic clichés concerning the battle of the sexes of this the libretto is largely composed; and indeed how would she handle the potential of so much steamy womanhood on stage. Busy as the production is: there is little invention, insight or spin. Just a reminder for the blokes in the audience never to trust a pretty woman. Why anyone as good as Zambella would think of approaching this ridiculously melodramatic story so realistically is beyond me. And not true realism either (which could have been an interesting option, given the clunkiness of the storyline), but corny ‘huff-and-puff’ realism where the chorus slaps its hips in unison and run around like rehearsed chooks. So much fake tan and flinging around of skirts. What do they call it, ‘mash potato’ acting, after the dead obvious mimed mouthing in unison of meaningless phrases.

I do hope I have not blown the relationship between www.australianstage.com.au and the Australian Opera by breaching convention by leaving at interval. But I really do not see why anyone should have to sit through more than two hours of something they find devoid of interest. If the company feels otherwise, I am more than happy to return the money for the complimentary tickets. And the AO can be assured I will not be rushing back, with someone more responsive to its vision representing this site. It received a good review for La Boheme, from a different writer, so that’s something I guess.

Since I’m not reviewing this production, I can’t tell you that Kirstin Chavez made for a sexy, if (under Zambello’s direction) predictably characterized Carmen and her low notes were gorgeous. I can’t mention Rosario La Spina as Don Jose, either, who offered up a most tender characterization with some outstandingly heartfelt singing. His second-act arias were, for me, the highlight of what I saw of the night. Sadly I cannot comment on Richard Hickox’s conducting, though well-paced, warm and full, and - unlike the production - refreshingly devoid of melodrama.

If you want to read a real review of this Carmen, I suggest looking to this Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald. That it, too, thought the staging was fatuous and cornball, is a mere coincidence

For those who stayed to the end they would know that Carmen ultimately dies at the hand of Don Jose, whose emotions she has been toying with from beginning to end. I now have to confess to a further motivation in leaving at interval. My own Spanish Carmen, this being Rafael Nadal (how many times must he pull his jocks out of his crack?) was playing a semi-final in the Australian Tennis Open. If Rafa tossed a rose at me, I too would be lost to tragic inevitability - as is Don Carlos when, in an early scene, his Carmen does the same.

Anyways, I got home in time to catch the third (and brutally final) set: where a hitherto unknown Cavalier from France named Jo-Wilfried Tsonga slayed my Rafa/Carmen on the vast plain of Rod Laver Arena in a manner so virtuosic as to utterly transcend the the banalities of art. Tears flood the laptop. Two dead Carmens in one night! That said Jo-Wilfried looks rather nice. In the tradition of Mother Courage, I admit to being a camp follower. So I pick up my cart and and trudge on.

Come on Opera Australia, isn't it time to catch up with the 21st century. And if your current audience doesn't like it, let them go. Prove your worth and a new generation (not all younger) will fill those seats.