English National Opera has now produced two new Toscas in four years, which says something about both the opera's commercial reliability and the company's current need for bankable titles. Annilese Miskimmon, ENO's own artistic director, directs this one — and the pressure to justify a second bite at the apple is visible in every conceptual choice. The central conceit is genuinely unusual for Tosca: Miskimmon strips Amanda Holden's translation of all geographical references and collapses the opera's three distinct real-world locations into a single ambiguous space. A plain mid-century modern church, cleaning ladies, a sacristan in dungarees. Then a battered baby grand and a mysterious string quartet suggest we're actually in a concert hall — though the sacristan still pauses to sing his Angelus, apparently undisturbed by the contradiction. The problem is that Tosca's ultra-realism is load-bearing. The opera's power in Act One comes precisely from the collision of sacred and political space — church as sanctuary invaded by state violence. Flatten that into one generic interior and you lose the visceral wrongness of Scarpia's intrusion. Act Two's layered onstage and offstage worlds, another source of dread, also dissolve. What fills the gap is violence: women hauled by their hair, a cameo for the Marchioness Attavanti, smashed instruments, accumulating corpses. The impact diminishes on each iteration, which is the production's central miscalculation. Ben Glassberg draws sumptuously from the ENO orchestra — there are moments when the brass snap with real terror, and moments when the strings make everything onstage temporarily irrelevant. The chorus roars into life with genuine commitment, children included. Axelle Fanyo in the title role delivers a tone that is covered, luxurious, and poured in a liquid torrent; when she's in full voice, the staging problems recede. Chaz'men Williams-Ali struggles as Cavaradossi, buried in the back, outgunned by both the room's acoustic geometry and the sheer size of the voices around him. And then there is Christopher Purves. His Scarpia is as starched as his uniform and as chilly as his baritone — diction like nails, posture like a threat, a performance built from specific physical choices rather than generalized menace. He alone makes the production feel purposeful. The staging hands him a context that underserves the character's full dramatic function, and he makes it irrelevant. This is not a vintage Tosca. Purves's Scarpia might be.
