Oliver Mears’ Tosca at The Royal Opera House

Last Updated on June 8, 2026

Politics is Pervasive

5.0 out of 5.0 stars

A new production of Puccini’s Tosca at an institution like the Royal Opera that is reliant on a regular turnover of repertoire classics is always a big deal. When the director is Oliver Mears, the institution’s Director of Opera and the production is Covent Garden’s new music director Jakub Hrůša’s first outing in the role, then even more so. The appearance of a group of demonstrators outside the opera house with placards and megaphones on opening night was not the most desirable way to bring this new Tosca into the world.

The opera is about individuals caught up in the brutal mundanity of the machinery and power of a repressive state. Playing Tosca is the great diva Anna Netrebko, now an Austrian citizen but born Russian, and described in The Times as a ‘symbol of cultural propaganda for the Russian regime’. The singer has criticised the war without attacking Putin personally. For individual artists caught up in this geopolitical nightmare, the pressures are clearly immense. Netrebko’s omission has led to a letter demanding her withdrawal from the role written by a cross-party group of MPs and more than 50 Ukrainian artists. After the recent furore when a performer unfurled a Palestinian flag during a curtain call, with Mears involved in an onstage scuffle, this was not the publicity a state-funded institution needs. With recent Russian incursions into a NATO country, Netrebko’s casting, whilst creatively and musically exciting, was politically naïve.

Tosca, with a ravishingly lyrical and nakedly melodramatic score and a lean libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, was first performed in 1900 at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome. It was an immediate hit and is the second of Puccini’s sequence of three operas featuring tragic heroines – La Bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly. The libretto is based on La Tosca, a French play from 1887 written by Victorien Sardou, with the opera set precisely 100 years before the date of its premiere. At this point in its history, Italy was not yet unified and was in a constant state of upheaval, with foreign powers jockeying to take control of the wealthy city-states that made up the country.

The story of Tosca takes place in Rome at a time when King Ferdinand VI of Sicily ruled the Eternal City, having retaken it from Napoleon and the French. However, Napoleon had returned to the north of Italy, capturing Milan on June 2nd, with the battle of Marengo raging as the opera progresses. The story of opera singer Floria Tosca, her jealous love for the painter Cavaradossi and the couple’s tragic conflict with the all-powerful Chief of Police Baron Scarpia plays out against this historical background. The opera is one of the first in the period written in the new ‘verismo’ style, aiming for authenticity of narrative and emotion. The score is underpinned by a series of thematic and character-based musical leitmotifs that lend dramatic impetus and coherence.

Set designer Simon Lima Holdsworth and Mears have created a modern production that is not tied to a specific period. The three acts seem to reference different eras of political repression. Act 1 is set in the interior of Borromini’s Sant’ Ivo alla Sapienza, a 17th-century church in Rome. We are in wartime, probably the Second World War. There are piles of damaged marble and broken ecclesiastical furniture, and a Bernini-esque sculpture with a towering backdrop of marble columns. Lighting Designer Fabiana Piccioli creates an extraordinarily lit tableau of worshippers, both shrouded and illuminated by smoke and flashes of light from bombing.

Scarpia’s office is the location for Act II. It’s a 1940s Fascist marble interior with a huge, burnished brass door, a mash-up of classicism and modernism with a big clock on the wall marking time that is running out for Cavaradossi and Tosca and the regime itself. There’s also a video screen on the floor. The pristine interior contrasts with the scarlet blood on Cavaradossi and his torturers. Piccioli again impresses with an inventive use of light and shadow.

The final act is located in a contemporary, white-tiled office/cell used for state-sanctioned assassinations. The tiles are blood-stained, and there’s a CCTV camera and a crucifix on the wall, with the window having a view of St. Peter’s.

As Floria Tosca, Anna Netrebko hits the stage like a hurricane of emotion, seemingly unaffected by the demo outside the theatre. She is decked out by costume designer Ilona Karas in a shocking pink cocktail dress that stands out from the greys and whites elsewhere. Her “Vissi d’arte” has a sublime luminosity with a voice that has a remarkable tonal consistency across all the registers. There is humour and a spellbinding sensuality in her performance.

Tunbridge Wells born tenor Freddie De Tommaso had his big break in 2021, aged 28, when, preparing to sing the role of the artist Mario Cavaradossi in the second cast, he was called up on press night just before the interval when the star tenor, Bryan Hymel was taken ill. He is now the leading Cavaradossi in the world with a voice that has darkened in the last few years, having the tonal quality of a baritone. De Tommaso now displays an emotional maturity and vocal power that reached out to the back row of the stalls circle. He was a fine match for Netrebko, even if the romantic chemistry wasn’t totally present between the mature diva and the new young star. He has moved on a lot since his 2022 Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly, and his ‘E lucevan le stelle’ was met with a deserved ovation.

Grammy award winner Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley makes an insidious, cartoon baddy as Baron Scarpia. His look seems to be modelled on Laurence Olivier as the terrifying Dr. Christian Szell in the film ‘Marathon Man’. Finley was brilliant as the guilty father Helge in Mark-Anthony Turnage’s recent hit Festen, and the cruelty oozes out of his characterisation of Scarpia both physically and vocally in his showcase aria ‘Ha più forte sapore’.

In the smaller parts, Carlo Bosi is a weaselly and put-upon Spoletta, Scarpia’s sidekick, and Alessandro Corbelli brings out the comedic elements of the Sacristan.

Jette Parker Artist British bass-baritone Ossian Huskinson displays a macho sense of self-confidence as the fugitive Cesare Angelotti, as he did in the role of Jupiter in Garsington Opera’s Platée. He should be stepping up to more demanding roles in the near future.

The Children’s Chorus from Cardinal Vaughan School and Grey Coat Hospital School were energetic and precise, bringing a youthful vibrancy to the stage.

Conductor Jakub Hrůša is at the start of his Royal Opera House honeymoon. The orchestra were at their very finest under his baton. Puccini’s score was delivered with a dramatic intensity and rhythmic precision that drove and shaped the drama on stage. Long may it last!

The ROH’s previous much-reprised production of Tosca, directed by Jonathan Kent, had become a comfortable old pair of slippers, visually sumptuous and totally reliable. Oliver Mears’ Tosca is fresh and high on melodrama and entertainment value, with a first cast that reaches the peaks of operatic excellence. The storm over the casting will soon be forgotten whilst the war rages on.

Tosca

11 September–7 October 2025

Royal Opera House
Bow Street
London
WC2E 9DD

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