A huge painted stage curtain appears at several moments throughout the German director Christof Loy’s impressive new Tosca for English National Opera. It creeps across a church wall in the first act, then into the gripping murder scene of Act 2, before eventually dominating the entire stage. Loy would seem to be providing the main characters with a massive artificial backdrop for their own personal dramas, preoccupations that sit apart from the stark collision of passion and politics unfolding on stage.
Take Scarpia, the dreaded chief of police. So chilling is Puccini’s musical motif for this brutal character, he normally need do nothing more than sweep on to the stage to send real shivers down the spine. But here, on his first entrance into the church where he believes a fugitive is hiding, he falls to his knees and writhes on the floor, acting out his unspoken lust for Tosca, almost searching for an audience among the congregation. She in turn plays up her role as the leading opera singer of her day, theatrically jealous of her lover Mario Cavaradossi while also desperate to protect him and his fellow revolutionaries from the vile Scarpia.
