IF you saw Chris Monks’s irreverent, self-aware musical theatre refurbishments of The Pirates Of Penzance in 2009 and The Mikado last summer, you are in for a shock after those affectionate, spoofing, spiffing takes on Gilbert & Sullivan – and not only because of the adult content and very adult language in Carmen.

Carmen is an altogether nastier, more brutish beast, whose laughs are applied more like a kick in the face – and less successfully as a result.

I don’t recall the 2003 version that Monks brought north in his New Vic days being so ready to pick a fight, but that could be a sign of more vicious times.

Everything is shorter now, from tempers to skirts to football contracts.

There is one significant difference from those G&S re-boots; the librettos were already written in English, whereas Georges Bizet’s “tunes” for Carmen – the first musical proper according to Monks – have to match English patterns of speech.

Sometimes it works well, like when the rhythm snugly fits around Caroline Keiff’s temptress Carmen singing “there’s a well dodgy wine bar” but the long discourse between Carmen and her jilted lover Johnny Jay (Gareth Kennerley) loses momentum on the rocks of so many words, especially as the wit has run dry, like the course of their mis-matched relationship.

This marriage of Bizet, soap opera and Footballers’ Wives is set in the modern Britain of shopping malls, where Carmen grinds out her day as a supermarket check-out girl and starts fights to keep the security guards like ex-soldier Johnny on their toes.

Out goes Spain, bullfighting and the Toreador. In comes the English north west – although the accents come from all over, Geordieland, London, Wales – where the 90 million Italian stallion Tony Amor (Neil Moors) is the new darling of perennial Premier League champions United, scoring as often off the pitch as on.

He has his eye on Carmen, his nose full of cocaine, and he is not averse to mixing with drug-dealing, contraband United shirt-selling Mr Duncan (John Elkington). Jilted Johnny is out of his league.

Unlike in 2003, the concept works better than the somewhat forced delivery, but there are enjoyable details, not least the television screens for surveillance, news bulletins and spoof adverts featuring cast members from the SJT’s summer repertory company.

Check out the Meadowlands mall girls’ nightlife wardrobe, straight off the Scarborough pegs; look out for Terence Booth’s football punditry in the On The Game spoof TV show; and swoon at Moors’ Amor, a splendid parody of the modern foreign football mercenary. Stand back too from the loud leopard-skin roar of barmaid Sarah Parks’s Bet Lynch parody.

Carmen 2011 is less playful, less tongue in cheek, rather more serious and darker in its savage, saucy depiction of the rotten, rudely unhealthy state of Britain. Acid, but not so sharp.

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