Tosca review – Puccini’s high-octane bloodbath bonanza makes for a shocking festival kick-off

Glyndebourne, Sussex
Caitlin Gotimer’s Tosca goes from 0-60 in mere moments while the London Philharmonic unlock the barely contained violence in Ted Huffman’s long-awaited exceptional staging

Giacomo Puccini died only a decade before the first Glyndebourne festival opened. 92 years later, Tosca – global operatic blockbuster and the work once derided as a “shabby little shocker” – has finally made its Glyndebourne debut, opening the 2026 festival with a high-octane bloodbath presided over by director Ted Huffman. Forget shabbiness (and not just because of the champagne and tuxedos); this show is all about the shock.

But Huffman and conductor Robin Ticciati also play the dramatic long game. The curtain goes up on a mid-20th-century church interior. There are wooden pews and a small Madonna and child on the wall. Boys in uniform assist men in cassocks; there’s a real mop bucket, a real wooden ladder for the artist-hero and real mid-century modern spotlights to illuminate his work (the first of many exquisite details of this production’s lighting). It’s not 1800, but this is unmistakably Tosca, its accoutrements familiar.
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