Sinéad Campbell Wallace shines in this messy take on Tosca

Sinéad Campbell Wallace as Tosca and Dimitri Pittas as Cavaradossi. Photo: Pat Redmond

Emer O'Kelly

July 24 2022 02:30 AM

Tosca Bord Gáis Energy Theatre

The first important comment on Irish National Opera’s new production of Puccini’s Tosca is that the core of it is superlative. That’s the singing. But as things move out from the core, it all gets a bit complicated. Another word might be “messy”.

For that, director Michael Gielata must take the blame.

The narrative of Tosca is no more complicated than is common in opera. But Puccini (who took the tale from a French play written for Sarah Bernhardt) counter-balanced the possibility of bewilderment with a fully site, sound, and time-specific libretto.

Floria Tosca, the renowned singer, and her lover, the painter Cavaradossi, are supporters of the Napoleonic-imposed Republic of Rome, which was undermined by Catholic forces – with Napoleon himself marching on the city to restore order on the night of the Battle of Marengo in 1800.

The former Consul of the Republic, the nobleman Angelotti, imprisoned by the Church-backed corrupt police chief Scarpia, escapes and seeks sanctuary in a church, only to kill himself on his re-capture.

Cavaradossi, who has assisted him, is taken prisoner and tortured, then executed. Tosca, who “knows all”, now realises that art is not everything, and takes on a political counter-spy role, only for her plan to fail, but after she has managed to knife Scarpia to death as he is about to force himself on her. Are you still with me?

And we end on one of the great moments of opera, set in Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, with Tosca racing on to the battlements and throwing herself off in despair.

Gielata has chosen to move the action to the mid-20th century, and indeed Scarpia is costumed by designer Gary McCann in vaguely Nazi uniform. It might well have worked had the director placed the piece during the Nazis’ brutal World War II occupation of Rome.

But for some reason the rest of the costuming is 1950s, with Rome very much the restored holy Eternal City – a situation certainly anathema to the atheists so despised by Puccini’s verbose Sacristan in the first act of the opera, but in no danger of causing war and rebellion.

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Further, McCann’s sets (which must have cost a fortune) are also complex to a distracting degree. There is a central revolve the singers seem to find awkward (and the stagehands find difficult in moving) and a final vaguely Art Deco sweep of staircase behind which Tosca poses somewhat anticlimactically, not seeming to know what she wants to do.

Yet this Tosca (Sinéad Campbell Wallace) transcends it all with a performance of lyrical passion which descends impressively into raging venom in Act Three. Alone, she would have made the evening more than worthwhile.

Her Cavaradossi, the tenor Dimitri Pittas, while overshadowed somewhat, is a fervent and rich adjunct throughout.

Tómas Tómasson sings his second role in Ireland (Orest in the splendid Elektra by Richard Strauss at Kilkenny last year) as the villainous Scarpia. One of the great villain roles (bass baritone) in opera, Scarpia hasn’t a single redeeming feature in either his career or his sleazy lifestyle, and Tómasson gives full musical vent to it all.

The two main feature roles are both superbly filled by basses John Molloy as the noble and doomed Angelotti, and Graeme Danby (who has specialised worldwide in the role) as the fussily irritated Sacristan. And special mention too for treble Joe Dwyer, costumed as an angel, who is, well, angelic in the role of the streetboy at the start of Act Three.

Nil Venditti conducts the INO Orchestra with considerable, at times almost jazzy, verve but the enthusiasm comes with occasional loss of control as the balance between orchestra and singers becomes a bit uneven.

Tosca is Irish National Opera’s (INO) first production in its 2022 -23 season. There were five performances at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in Dublin, and with luck, it will become available onstream in months to come.

INO also featured at the Galway International Arts Festival with Enda Walsh and Donnacha Dennehy’s The First Child, which finishes tonight and will tour countrywide in September.

Danby will return to Ireland in November, when he will sing the title role in Don Pasquale for INO’s winter tour. And Rossini’s William Tell will get its first Irish production since the 1870s, in a co-production at the Gaiety with Nouvel Opera Fribourg – which might have something to do with INO’s executive director Diego Fasciati being Swiss.