IN a run-down shopping mall, shoplifting, having fights and checking out the talent are all ways for the workers to fend off boredom.

Right at the centre is feisty Carmen, who is drawn to glamorous football superstar Tony Amor, alias The Italian Stallion, but is tied to Johnny, the temperamental ex-soldier turned security guard.

All too soon she will discover what it means to live and love beyond the law.

Welcome to Chris Monks’s modern re-telling of George Bizet’s tale of jealousy and passion, Carmen, as the Stephen Joseph Theatre artistic director continues his love affair with re-tooling operas in Scarborough, in the wake of the Gilbert & Sullivan brace of The Mikado last year and The Pirates Of Penzance in 2009.

In fact this is Chris’s fourth staging of Carmen. “I’ve updated it as much as necessary, though I’ve not had to do a lot of work on the script,” he says.

“This is the third time I’ve done it professionally, starting in 1998, and there was also a student production in Newcastle in 2006 for the University of Northumberland – and each time the price tag of the footballer has gone up!” ‘Amor, Amor, the Sicilian, he cost us 30 million’…by 2003 it was 40 million and now it’s 90 million, which just shows how ridiculous football has become!”

Chris changed Bizet’s gipsy girls in a cigarette factory to shop girls in a mall, but Carmen has moved workplace for the 2011 version. “They’re still working in a run-down supermarket, which was Kwik Save originally but they’ve gone belly-up so now it’s another sub-Tesco supermarket!” he says.

Monks’s switch from bull-fighting to football reflects the inexorable rise of one sport over another. “The adoration that bullfighters had in 1875 is very different to what they receive today, hence the transition to a footballer, which Carmen now sees as her way out of her terrible existence,” he says.

Chris plays true to the rebellious streak in Bizet. “His opera was set in 1875 in a cigarette factory in an age when polite women didn’t smoke and if they did, they were looking for ‘business’, and at a time when people wanted fluff in their operas but he wouldn’t give them fluff,” he says.

“Bizet refused to change it and make it fluffy, as he wanted to create something more original, and despite desperate pleading from the management, there’s no happy ending. It’s domestic violence set to music.”

Chris considers Carmen to be “the first musical” as much as an opera. “It’s full of spectacle and tunes that you can hold on to,” he says. “Bizet was way ahead of his time and sadly, because writing this piece exhausted him, he died only three months later.

“A musical like West Side Story really has the spirit of Carmen in it and the effect of Bizet’s opera on music has been titanic.”

Now, Monks’s English account of Carmen gives it an immediacy and accessibility. “The audience recognises the characters, the shoplifters, the shopping mall. If you set it somewhere closer to home, they understand it more.

“I’ve been accused of putting a moustache on the Mona Lisa, but my version is born of a real love of the original,” he says. “I’m celebrating it and opening it up to people.”

Carmen runs at Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, on various dates until September 3. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com