When Spoletta is the best thing about a new production of Tosca, you're in trouble. There was a brooding malevolence about Aled Hall's police agent that was missing from the portrayal of his boss, the villainous Baron Scarpia. Hall's diction had real bite and his glowering at Cavaradossi, painter and republican sympathiser, betrayed contempt. At the opera's climax, when Tosca climbs the ladder to hurl herself from the Castel Sant'Angelo, Spoletta follows her, turning to launch a furious snarl at the audience as the curtain falls. If only we'd seen such passion elsewhere.
There are many things wrong with English Touring Opera's show. Whoever approved Florence de Maré's set design deserves to replace Cavaradossi in front of the firing squad. A slanting ramp of a walkway juts through a short flight of stairs which meant most of the cast spent their time nervously negotiating a trip hazard. A single set and minimal stage furnishings are understandable for a production which has to fit into twenty theatres on tour but this was minimalist in the extreme. A black backdrop meant no sunlight-filled church, no Roman dawn. Only the basic elements of the Church of Sant'Andrea della Valle survive: the statue of the Madonna, a trapdoor leading down to the Attavanti Chapel and an easel, turned the wrong way so the audience cannot see Cavaradossi's portrait. In Act 2, the Attavanti Chapel trapdoor doubles rather more convincingly as Scarpia's torture chamber. In Act 3 a narrow tower, in which recalcitrant doors and window shutters had refused to close in earlier acts, became the means for Tosca's leap.