Carmen is a poisoned chalice and Carlos Acosta drinks deeply

Carmen is a heroine who embodies the mid-nineteenth century bourgeois male idea that, left to their primitive, natural state, untouched by either Church or society’s civilising conventions, women are sexually irrepressible, promiscuous, fickle and dishonourable. The only profession they’d be qualified for, her creator (the French novelist Prosper Mérimée) reckons, is rolling cigars in a [...]