You don’t go back to a ballet again and again just to see the ballet. You go to see what different artists make of that ballet (same with opera; same with theatre). An alternative cast brings its own atmosphere to a piece, or at least one hopes it does. 

The overall framework of the piece stays the same but details can be much altered and the viewer’s response with them. Gestures, expressions, the way in which performers interact with one another: these can and should be highly individual while still in service to the work as a whole.

The Australian Ballet premiered Johan Inger’s Carmen last year in Sydney. After seeing principal artists Jill Ogai and Callum Linnane as Carmen and Don Jose in both Sydney and then Melbourne (in March this year) I took the opportunity of the company’s tour to Canberra to see coryphée Lilla Harvey and principal artist Marcus Morelli in the lead roles. 

In the hands of Ogai and Linnane, both phenomenal, the piece was brutal. If you wanted a picture of a man utterly and chillingly turned in on himself, that was it. Carmen blazed like the sun and was as untameable. These weren’t just characters, they were embodiments of the struggle between the need to control and the desire to be free.

The performance I saw in Canberra operated on a less monumental scale. It may have been a more intimate reading of the ballet but was just as powerful. 

Morelli, a passionate, soul-baring force on stage, was a man whose skin was too thin. Every molecule of his pain was on show as he pursued Harvey’s Carmen, a careless young woman who didn’t realise she was playing with fire. The two demanded you see them in all their human frailty, not as personifications of an idea. 

Coryphée Timothy Coleman was Don José’s superior officer Zúñiga,  killed by Don José as his jealousy becomes all-consuming. Coleman never fails to show you something real about a character; you can always imagine they have a life elsewhere. It’s always good to see him.

Soloist Maxim Zenin was a preening, glistening, implacably self-regarding Torero: the Mick Jagger of the corrida. You could see why Morelli’s Don José might kill Zúñiga but not Torero. The toreador’s disdain inevitably stoked Don José’s humiliation. 

These were new, thought-provoking dynamics in an exceptional performance, particularly from Morelli. Not that anything could change the result. Don José is far less important to Carmen than she to him and he just can’t bear it. So he kills her. 

Carmen is at the Canberra Theatre Centre until June 25.