SINGER Diego Torre is used to playing the nice guys in opera – that normally goes with being a tenor – but as Carmen’s lover Don José, the role he shares with Roberto Aronica in Opera Australia’s new Opera on Cockatoo Island, he gets to plays a wimp.

This new production of Bizet’s perennially popular opera, directed by Liesel Badorrek and designed by Mark Thompson, is billed as gritty and immersive, featuring a world of misfits, fringe dwellers and outsiders and complete with motorbike stunts, nightly fireworks and a touch of rock ‘n’ roll.

But all the razzle-dazzle can’t get around the puzzling fact that the romantic male lead is weak.

When I catch up with Torre, who has made his home with his family in Australia since first coming here to sing in 2011, he talks about the psychology of the simple soldier, Don José, who murders Carmen in a jealous rage in the concluding moments of the opera.

“He’s not a bad guy,” he says, “but let’s not try to victimise Carmen either—My opinion is that both characters should never have got together– it just happened.”

He’s been going into the question of Don José’s character deeply with Badorrek and says, “Don José is coming from a different atmosphere, he’s a boy who loves his mother and is trying to do the right thing in his life…but he finds himself in contact with Carmen.. she starts to seduce him, then manipulates him, then humiliates him, and as a response, he kills her. That is the tragedy.”

Don José’s conflicts come out in the music so that whenever looking at the past, Torre says, there’s a leitmotif indicating the time with his mother, a time when he was happy. Certainly, he has concluded, there is weakness of character there, and his village girlfriend, Michaela, is unable to save him.

“Carmen” was written by Bizet as an “opera-comique,” in a mixture of spoken and sung dialogue, but not in this interpretation, he says, which is sung-through, giving greater weight to the sense of impending tragedy.

Oddly, for a veteran performer with 32 productions for Opera Australia behind him, Torre has never performed in Handa Opera on the Harbour so is somewhat intimidated by the size of the huge outdoor Cockatoo Island stage.

“I’m a little bit nervous. It’ll be a first,” he says.

“Everything has to be bigger in this production. I’ve had discussions with the director on this point, so we need to minimise our movements to make it clear to the audience what’s happening.”

“Carmen”, Opera Australia at Cockatoo Island, November 25-December 18.