'The banality of evil', a phrase used by Hannah Arendt after attending Adolf Eichmann's trial, is so dimmed by overuse that it hardly says anything any more. But this production of Tosca restored it to sadly-relevant vividness. It is set in the late 1960s in a wonderful evocation of a scruffy Italian piazza in Mafia-infested Rome. With a characteristic Italian mix of religion and politics, posters urging 'Vota Scarpia' are slapped all over the walls around a church door, flanked by a shrine to the Madonna and a holy-water fount, and the grafittied iron shutter of a trattoria. 'Cleanliness, order, morality' (the posters' slogan) are allied with the repressive police chief Scarpia, who is accompanied by clerics and good family members, including children, and opposed by rather half-baked, dirty hippies. Unlike most Scarpias, who, whatever era they inhabit, tend to be grandly dressed, Nicholas Garrett strides around like a cocky wide-boy, shoulders back and chin up in a shiny bluish suit. But his vulgarity in no way diminishes his menace and cruelty, especially when, while Cavaradossi is tortured off-stage beyond the banal ribbon curtains of the café, he gives orders while eating at a table outside.
       About suffering Stephen Barlow is never wrong. And, though admittedly the sixites also belong to our past along with 1800 in which Tosca is actually set, he retrieves this Old Master from the pious fancy-dress it sometimes wears into horrible immediacy. Until the final auto-da-fe (which it literally is) we see the optimistic ineffectualness of the peace-and-love merchants, and have the sense that cruelty and repression will always be in the ascendance. But love, as well as evil, is richly communicated, particularly in the lovers' first scene together, where Amanda Echalaz as Tosca (the night I saw it) conveys her wild passion and the wild jealousy that goes with it, and Sean Ruane as Cavaradossi is happily secure in the opulence of their love. The two singers were wonderfully attuned physically and vocally, and in fact had sung the same roles in the summer in Stephen Barlow's original staging of the opera in Holland Park.
       Possibly missing was the sense of the progress of Tosca's motivation in the murder scene (Maria Callas, in her rendition of this scene, suddenly stares at the knife on the table and picks it up, knocking over her red wine). But that is a cavil about what is overall a dramatic and musical triumph.
Jane O'Grady