IN this football age of Beckhamania and pampered prima donnas in Alice bands, Chris Monks has reinvented Carmen as Bizet's answer to Footballers' Wives. He shoots, he scores.

Monks first 'Monkeyed around' with Carmen five years ago, since when he has hit The Mikado for six on the cricket field and cast Mozart's The Marriage Of Figaro into a Euro superstate where politicians are more sexed up than Bill Clinton.

The playful Monks and his New Vic Theatre actor-singers have built a following in Scarborough with his saucy and irreverent productions that combine vim with Viz.

As with The Mikado and Figaro, Monks creates a new libretto and soap-opera script, this time tart and cutting in its humour, hot and bothered in its sexuality, increasingly dark of mood, yet with a tongue seeking out the cheek whenever opportunity arises. The language is as ripe as soft cheese and just as cheesy.

The 'songs' remain the same, but the lyrics acquire rude candour and playful rhymes in their down-to-earth translation, losing their operatic grandeur in acquiring the character of a comic-book cartoon strip.

Out goes Spain, bull fighting and the Toreador. In comes the English North West, football and Tony Amor, United's Italian stallion leading scorer on and off the field.

Any similarity with a certain United from Manchester is purely coincidental, but let's just say this particular United wears red, wins everything, and a replica shirt deal looms large in the plot. Georges Bizet meets George Best, you could say.

Carmen is still called Carmen - so named because her mother got pregnant in Ibiza - but this explosive blonde bombshell Carmen (Kirsty Malpass) now works as a supermarket checkout girl rather than in a cigarette factory. She remains short of fuse and shorter of skirt length, and top of the shopping wish list for shopping centre security guard Johnny Jay (Jason McCann, with his blond highlights and clenched-fist demeanour).

Enter Tony Amor (swarthy Matt Rawle, plus deliberately OTT Italian accent), the cool, yet hot, soccer stud in his linen suit and Carbone comb in his hair. Inevitably, loyal but dull Johnny will be jilted and consigned to the subs' bench.

Monks's multi-media production is as up-to-date as Amor's fashions. Carmen 2003 comes with drug-dealing, Amor on cocaine and plenty of female belly buttons on show, and Monks makes much use of television, for closed-circuit surveillance, news bulletins, pop video pastiches and spoof adverts.

This sinfully good show has snap, crackle and popera.

Box office: 01723 370541

Updated: 12:36 Thursday, September 25, 2003