London's New Tosca Leaves Puccini's Rome Behind

English National Opera has opened a new Tosca at the Coliseum in London, staged by Annilese Miskimmon, and the Guardian's critic has received it coldly. In a notice published on 1 November, the paper says the production abandons Puccini's realism for "baffling and near-constant violence", adding that the radical reading brings losses rather than gains.

The review's central objection is geographical as much as dramaturgical. Miskimmon's staging, the Guardian writes, unmoors the opera from its church and state settings, stripping out the ecclesiastical and political scaffolding on which the drama turns. Christopher Purves's Scarpia, by contrast, is called "terrific" — a brutish reading of the Roman police chief who sets the tragedy in motion.

Tosca is among the most literal works in the repertory. Its three acts occupy named Roman places — a church, a palace, the battlements of Castel Sant'Angelo — across roughly a day, with a Te Deum and an offstage cantata timed into the action. Directors who relocate it are usually trying to break that literalism. The Guardian's verdict suggests that here the break cost more than it bought.