Johan Inger sees Carmen as a nightmare, which it is. In his darker-than-dark version of a story that just won’t go away, the Swedish choreographer gets inside the head of the woman’s murderer, Don Jose, and chillingly finds nothing there.

Well, there’s a writhing, stuttering collection of destructive impulses but otherwise Inger’s Don Jose is an abject nobody who can’t have what he wants so destroys it. 

The gulf between the woman and her pursuer could not be wider and the disconnect gave The Australian Ballet’s staging of this 2015 work its knockout punch on opening night. With Carmen’s death a blazing light was sucked into a black hole.

Jill Ogai’s physical daring and natural, vivid stage presence made her a phenomenal Carmen. The ferocious appetite for life was intoxicating. When she was present no one else mattered.

For a choreographer wanting to deny Don Jose the slightest drop of sympathy, the charismatic Callum Linnane would seem counter-intuitive casting. 

Intriguingly, Linnane went against type to erase all vestiges of personal allure. His Don Jose was a blank-eyed man who could have been the walking dead. He disappeared into the tormented body language and was increasingly devoured by an ever-growing phalanx of masked figures.

These external expressions of internal disintegration were used strikingly as Don Jose obsessed over Carmen’s other suitors, the slinky toreador (Marcus Morelli, a kind of human glitter-ball in his sequinned jacket) and Don Jose’s superior officer Zuniga (Brett Chynoweth, tightly coiled). When Don Jose kills Zuniga the masked figures – Shadows, as Inger calls them – pick up the body so it looks as if Zuniga is floating away. 

Carmen isn’t short of striking images. In Bizet’s opera Don Jose gets to sing a lovely aria about the flower Carmen threw at him. Here Don Jose imagines the gesture as a multitude of blooms raining down on him, flowers he frantically scrambles on the ground to retrieve. As for the women, Carmen and her fellow workers at the cigar factory are made of much sterner stuff, within the limits allowed by the men who employ them and desire them, and Inger doesn’t stint on showing just how terrible those limits can be.

The setting for this unsettling psychological drama is a stripped-back, anonymous, anywhere at any time place. Colours are mostly neutral and a fluid design of moveable panels only lightly suggests locations. Suffice it to say we are a long way from sunny Seville, bandits’ hideouts and bull-fighting rings. 

A long way too from the Bizet opera that kickstarted the Carmen industry in 1875. Inger is more indebted to Prosper Merimee’s down-and-dirty novella, published in 1845 and well worth a read, although he has a decidedly 21^st-century take on the material.

Inger replaces Merimee’s framing device with one of his own, introducing a Boy (Lilla Harvey) who observes and sometimes participates in the action, most unforgettably in Don Jose’s fantasy of playing happy families with Carmen. The Boy could also be Don Jose as a child, or a warning that the cycle of violence against women will be perpetuated.

Inger’s championing of women is laudable even as his choreography sometimes falls into cliches of female sexuality (there are three assistant choreographers credited, all male). You might argue that to show something is to critique it but it doesn’t always feel that considered. Some images, mercifully few, would have made more sense had they been unequivocal illustrations of how Don Jose looks at Carmen – his crudeness, not hers.

There are also a couple of longueurs, strange for such a compact work, and Inger does us no favours by asking for wince-making singing to Bizet’s Toreador theme, which the dancers did badly. 

What they did do superbly was interpret an undeniably powerful vision. The tight cast of 18 was intensely engaged with Inger’s expansive, hyper-articulated movement and looked wonderful in it. 

It would be a brave choreographer who didn’t use Bizet’s score in some form and here it’s heard in Rodion Shchedrin’s Carmen Suite (1967) and other orchestrations, interspersed with additional new compositions by Marc Alvarez.

The music is terrific, familiar but often surprising, and boldly delivered by the Opera Australia Orchestra with visiting conductor Daniel Capps at the helm.

The Australian Ballet’s Carmen ends on April 27.

A version of this review first appeared in The Australian on April 14.