Tosca

In some way, the production of Tosca (CNT Rijeka, Summer Classics Festival in Pula) had the character of a manifesto. In each of the three acts one could see three different ways of its possible staging. The first act was a journey into operatic historicism, not without sentimental irony: the traditional audience was pleased by the beauty of figurative, romantically-realistic backdrop painting, the so called "historical", seemingly "authentic" costumes, and stylized melodramatic acting. The second act tangled with the trend of the so-called "modernization" or "actualization" of dramatic action and its transfer or "translation" into more recent space and time, even the present day, regardless of the more or less distracting dramaturgical conflicts between the libretto and musical score of the particular opera and the new social and political context of its actual staging. The second act of this manifesto-production was therefore set in Zagreb, World War 2, with Tosca appearing as Zinka Milanov and Scarpia as Ante Pavelić, the Head of Croatian fascists (the so called “ustaše”) and their “pupet-state”. Had Mrs. Milanov ever visited Croatia in those years, had she ever encountered Pavelić, one cannot but wonder whether the course of history would have been – in a Tarantinoesque twist – changed? The third act, finally, presented Tosca in a minimalistic staging, with all the theatricality reduced to the essential: empty space, music and drama, acting and singing, and personalities of two performers, the intensities of their artistic experience and expression.