ENO’s Tosca trades Puccini’s realism for violence — SkimNews
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- ENO mounted Annilese Miskimmon’s new Tosca four years after Christof Loy’s production, with Amanda Holden’s translation stripped of all place references and the entire opera confined to one space.
- Miskimmon constructed that setting from a plain mid-century church, cleaning ladies, a dungaree-clad sacristan-caretaker, a battered baby grand and a string quartet that arrives and immediately leaves, revealing what the programme calls a concert hall.
- Puccini’s drama loses the act-one collision of church and state and the act-two layering of onstage and offstage worlds; Miskimmon’s staging instead features women dragged by their hair, Attavanti screaming through the Te Deum, accumulating corpses and repeated instrument smashing.
- Ben Glassberg leads the ENO orchestra through sumptuous passages and vicious brass snaps that sometimes overwhelm the stage action, while the chorus performs with desperate intensity.
- Axelle Fanyo sings Tosca with a beautiful, luxurious tone that temporarily makes the constant onstage foot traffic irrelevant.
- Chaz’men Williams-Ali sounds uncomfortable as Cavaradossi, struggling to make an impact from the back of the stage against the onstage “offstage” musicians and several larger voices.
- Christopher Purves delivers a “terrific, brutish” Scarpia through starched posture, a stark and chilly baritone and hard-edged diction, the one element the critic believes might constitute a vintage Tosca.
Why it matters: Collapsing Tosca’s three real locations into one concert-hall space costs ENO’s production Puccini’s church-state collision and layered act-two world; four years after Christof Loy’s staging, the new version sacrifices structural realism, while a forceful Scarpia from Christopher Purves remains its clearest achievement.
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