Puccini's Il trittico runs on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from 5 to 18 March 2027, in Richard Jones's production.
Puccini wrote Il trittico as one evening in three panels and meant it to be played that way: Il tabarro, a Grand Guignol on a Paris barge that ends in a murder; Suor Angelica, a convent piece with no men in it at all, in which a woman learns her child is dead; and Gianni Schicchi, a comedy about a family squabbling over a will, containing the tune everybody knows. It opened in New York in 1918 and was almost immediately broken up, because houses found Schicchi easy to sell and Angelica hard.
The case for the whole triptych is that the three are one argument about death — feared, mourned, and finally laughed at — and that Schicchi is not funny in the same way when it stands alone. Suor Angelica is the one that decides a production: an hour of women in a convent with no dramatic incident until the last ten minutes, and it either holds the house completely or it does not hold it at all.
Richard Jones’s production runs on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from Friday 5 to Thursday 18 March 2027, all three in a single evening. Two weeks is a short booking for a piece of that length, and it is the first of two Jones productions the house stages this spring, Káťa Kabanová being the other.