The Stage

Tosca

Published Thursday 3 July 2008 at 14:30 by Edward Bhesania

Stephen Barlow’s new production of Puccini’s popular tragedy requires a willing suspension of disbelief. Instead of the action opening in the Baroque interior of Rome’s Sant’Andrea della Valle, we have its rundown façade. In the second act, Scarpia takes his supper in the same café, rather than in his palatial apartment. And, at the end, the jailed Cavaradossi is fired upon not at the Castel Sant’Angelo, but slumped inside a rusting Fiat.

The time is 1968 (not 1800), a period of elections as the fly-posters suggest, and the chief of police Scarpia’s campaign message of order and morality is sometimes symbolically overplastered with publicity for the diva Tosca’s forthcoming performance. The updating creates one or two awkward plot-holes, but Barlow succeeds in refreshing the story, and the cast rally round impressively to strengthen the effect. Seán Ruane’s Cavaradossi is dramatically convincing and vocally heroic, though he doesn’t have the Italianate ring to lift the sound. He works well with his Tosca, Amanda Echalaz, who inhabits the role entirely without artifice. From her first, striking appearance, in bright yellow dresscoat and white knee-length boots, to her grief-stricken suicide, she portrays a rounded character, feisty but totally in love, and her singing effortlessly mirrors her emotions. Sharp-suited Nicholas Garrett makes a stunning Scarpia. Vocally he is perhaps a touch too smooth, but he carries his lean, athletic frame with potent menace and magnetism. His attempt to subjugate Tosca in Act 2 comes with an undertone of violence that is theatrically incendiary. As, too, is Tosca’s end - but that’s a surprise.