Wagner rewilded: Das Rheingold, at the Royal Opera House, reviewed

In Northern Ireland Opera’s new Tosca, the curtain rises on a big concrete dish from which a pair of eyes gaze down, impassive. Walls of scaffolding tower on three sides of the stage, creaking as they expand under the heat of the stage lights. Point taken: Cameron Menzies’s production (the sets are by Niall McKeever) is a semi-abstract updating. It’s a fairly standard contemporary approach to Puccini’s Napoleonic thriller, though whether you get the full impact that comes with a more period-specific setting – that sense of individuals being crushed beneath the wheels of history – is another question. 

Anyway, that’s just how things are now and regular operagoers will be used to decoding the various surreal anachronisms that arise whenever a director sets out to cobble together a synthetic reality. Menzies does generate a potent atmosphere of entrapment and menace, and it’s a pity that he blunts the opera’s ending, with Cavaradossi picked off by cloaked figures on top of a sort of gantry, and Tosca throwing herself down the same flight of stairs that we’ve just seen Cavaradossi ascend. Sure, that’s got to hurt, but it doesn’t exactly look terminal.

Still, Tosca is a big exciting opera and this – the largest production in the company’s history – was a big exciting occasion, especially once the audience started to warm up. Cavaradossi was played by Peter Auty, a singer whose many fine qualities don’t really include sensuality. That gave a certain vulnerability to his big arias: the artist as boyish idealist, trapped between the more dangerous impulses of Tosca (Svetlana Kasyan) and Scarpia (Brendan Collins). With his knee-breeches and pervy facial hair, Collins made a plausible predator, singing with insinuating lyricism and a tone like black velvet.