Review: Tosca – ENO – London Coliseum

Whether through divine inspiration or the rather less heavenly state of ENO’s finances, Annilese Miskimmon has delivered a Tosca on one set, and it takes the scenic route to a genuinely memorable finale. It is also the company’s second new production of the opera in four years. Christof Loy’s lavish Helsinki import opened the 2022/23 season and has since quietly vanished, which suggests either boundless faith in Puccini’s box-office pull or a props store in urgent need of an inventory so writes Franco Milazzo for theQR.co.uk…

Puccini and his librettists pinned the story to three real Roman addresses: the church where Cavaradossi paints, Scarpia’s apartment in the Palazzo Farnese and the battlements of Castel Sant’Angelo. Miskimmon swaps all three for one room in an unnamed country sliding into authoritarianism, and the late Amanda Holden’s translation has been scrubbed of place names to match. It is a choice, certainly, and not an uncomfortable one. What the evening loses in scenery it gains in pressure. Cavaradossi is no longer perched on a scaffold in a side chapel but working in a concert hall that sits in the eye of a storm, and we watch the weather close in act by act.

Christopher Purves, making his role debut as Scarpia, is the best reason to buy a ticket.

Rosanna Vize’s design trades marble and gilt for a cavernous, dilapidated two-tier hall, with instruments scattered about like the leavings of an orchestra that left in a hurry. Then Scarpia’s goons arrive and destroy the instruments by smashing them on the floor. After the interval they lie in a broken heap centre stage, the regime’s opinion of culture rendered in splintered spruce and dented brass. As an image of a state coming apart, it works. The trouble is the room it sits in. On the West End’s largest stage, all that open floor drains the private scenes of heat, leaving Tosca and Cavaradossi to conduct their affair across several metres of nothing, like teenagers flirting from opposite ends of a school sports hall.

The concept also creaks wherever Puccini’s piety refuses to move out. A shrine to the Madonna sits oddly in a secular recital venue, and the Sacristan pottering among the music stands has the air of a caretaker who wandered in from a different opera. Purists will have conniptions; everyone else may simply wonder who is paying the lay minister’s wages.

A former member of the experimental rock outfit Harvey and the Wallbangers is not the obvious candidate for opera’s most ruthless policeman, yet Christopher Purves, making his role debut as Scarpia, is the best reason to buy a ticket. His chief of police is a starched predator whose mocking laugh lands like a cold flannel down the back of the neck. The press-night boos that greeted him at the curtain call were a badge of honour, and he earned every one.

Axelle Fanyo, the French soprano making her ENO debut in the title role, arrives with a Grammy for singing Refka in Kaija Saariaho’s Adriana Mater (which, in a neat piece of casting, is the very opera ENO is pairing with this one from 28 November). Her tone is luxurious, her presence magnetic, and her “Vissi d’arte” is sung with a heartfelt simplicity that makes the surrounding stage traffic look like an irrelevance. As Cavaradossi, Chaz’men Williams-Ali takes a while to get going. Once he does, the pair find the chemistry the set keeps trying to leak away.

Purists will have conniptions; everyone else may simply wonder who is paying the lay minister’s wages.

Holden’s text lacks bite in places but comes across with clarity and conversational ease, which in a sung translation is no small mercy. The framing, meanwhile, could hardly be more explicit: this is a study of how a totalitarian state crushes its artists and takes charge of the culture. There are welcome nods to Jonathan Miller’s celebrated staging, which dragged Rome into the Fascist 1940s, though borrowing from 1986 is a curious way to move into the future.

Only the pit is beyond reproach. Ben Glassberg (now music director at the Volksoper Wien) draws playing from the ENO Orchestra that is sumptuous, dynamic and properly dramatic, with the brass sharpened to a point and the big climaxes allowed to swell without turning syrupy. Whatever the staging does or fails to do, the score is in safe hands.

Which brings us to that ending. With no battlements to leap from, Miskimmon has had to find Tosca another exit, and the one she chooses (no spoilers here) is a proper coup de théâtre that lingers long after the walk back up St Martin’s Lane. It does not quite rescue a production that, for all its updating, feels less like a step forward than a sideways shuffle into a bigger room. Those final seconds are the only moment all evening when the stage outplays the pit.