Puccini's Tosca runs at the London Coliseum from 30 October to 11 December 2026, English National Opera's longest engagement of the autumn.
Puccini saw Sardou’s play La Tosca on tour in Italy in 1889, spent six years getting the rights, and four more turning a wordy French melodrama into three acts that run without a wasted bar. It opened in Rome on 14 January 1900 and has never left the repertoire. The plot is a police state in miniature: a singer, her painter lover, and a chief of police who offers to spare the man in exchange for her, set across one day in a Rome under Napoleonic threat, at three real addresses you can still walk between.
It is the opera people mean when they say opera is melodramatic, and the defence is that it is melodrama built with total technical control — Scarpia’s entrance, the torture offstage, the false execution — and that the arias people know from adverts are the moments the machinery stops. Its first night was played under a bomb threat, and the conductor was warned to start the national anthem if anything happened, a fitting piece of provenance.
English National Opera gives it at the London Coliseum from Friday 30 October to Friday 11 December 2026, sung in English, framed by the house as the art of resistance, which is the through-line of its nine-opera season. Six weeks makes it the Coliseum’s longest engagement of the autumn and the one with the widest choice of dates.