Puccini's radical compression of a Sarah Bernhardt stage vehicle, Tosca, returns to the Main Stage at Covent Garden in Oliver Mears's production next spring.
The Royal Opera brings back Oliver Mears’s staging of Puccini’s Tosca, set in a contemporary war-torn Rome, at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden from Monday 12 April 2027.
Victorien Sardou wrote La Tosca for Sarah Bernhardt in 1887. It was a vehicle: five acts of melodrama built to give her something to die of.
Puccini did not speak French but saw the play twice, and understood its shape from the stage alone. He cut it to three acts with no subplots, keeping every one of Sardou’s plot devices and throwing away his explaining.
The result is the opera most often accused of cheapness, usually by people who have not noticed how little of it is decoration. The piece was written about a specific occupation, so Mears’s modern setting keeps its subject in view.
Tosca plays on the Main Stage until Wednesday 5 May 2027 and shares it with Swan Lake through April and into May. Mears, the Royal Opera’s director of opera, also directs La Gioconda, which opens during the run. Two of his own productions therefore hold the same stage at once.