Stage Director

Tosca

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Marking its 20th anniversary, the St. Gallen Festival has turned away from its niche identity of presenting rarities and chosen instead one of the most frequently performed operas in the repertoire: Puccini’s Tosca. With such a familiar title, comparisons were inevitable, and the weight of expectation was high both musically and scenically. Remarkably, the production not only withstands that pressure but rises to it, achieving a level that satisfies on nearly every front.

Much of this success is due to Marcos Darbyshire’s direction. He presents the opera without distortion, yet his approach is far from conservative: by cutting directly to the essence of the work, he focuses on its central conflict: the collision of artistic freedom with political repression. 

Thomas Waltensweiler - Opernglas 

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Much of this success is due to Marcos Darbyshire’s direction. He presents the opera without distortion, yet his approach is far from conservative: by cutting directly to the essence of the work, he focuses on its central conflict: the collision of artistic freedom with political repression. 

. Gallen Festival: Puccini's “Tosca” is a political drama of oppressive topicality. Marcos Darbyshire stages Puccini's opera thriller at the Klosterhof as a case study of a stumbling state artist who gets caught up in the mills of an unjust state. Parallels to the present are intentional. (...) The clever staging of this opera thriller in the Klosterplatz makes this clear from the very first moment. (...) Of course, Darbyshire is concerned with more than an individual fate: he vividly demonstrates how quickly any exposed artist can lose his reputation and even his life if he gets involved with the wrong people in power.

Christian Wildhagen - Neue Zürcher Zeitung 

Director Marcos Darbyshire focuses on suspense, even high tension. The audience oftenseemed to be holding its breath, so close was the plot about violence, murder, suicide, torture, jealousy, power and love. 

Martin Preisser - St. Galler Tagblatt

 

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the St. Gallen Theater Festival, Puccini's “Tosca” is a statement: opera can be so gripping and so close to what moves and wants to be expressed in the present. Not only was the weather right at the premiere, but the emotions didn't stay cold either. 

Herbert Bütticker - roccocosound.ch

In his production, Argentinian opera director Marcos Darbyshire touches a sensitive nerve of contemporary politics. Tosca's powerless resistance reflects the individual's helplessness in the face of a system based on greed for power and cynicism. The hooded henchmen, who mingle with the audience before the performance even begins, convey a haunting sense of what it feels like to have to live under fear and terror.

Carmela Maggi - operundkultur.ch

Director Marcos Darbyshire and his set team (stage Martin Hickmann, costumes Annemarie Bulla) set the tone even before the start: black-clad henchmen with batons patrol between the expectant audience on the festival grounds. (...) The thugs remain omnipresent in this production and especially in the second act, where the private and political events overlap. In the center of the stage, previously dominated by Cavaradossi's image of the Virgin Mary, now stands the desk at which Scarpia pulls his strings in front of towering filing cabinets and drives Floria Tosca into a corner to Cavaradossi's cries of torture until she buckles - “più non posso!” Carried by a trio of soloists in top form, the action escalates into a deadly chamber play and at the same time an example of monstrous bureaucracy.

Peter Surber - saiten.ch

Darbyshire tells this story not as a sentimental romance, but as a dark thriller that unfolds with cinematic precision. (...) This “Tosca” impresses with its clarity, tempo and density - a coherent, exciting prelude to the St. Gallen Festival, which shows that great musical theater can also unfold its full effect under the open sky.

Andreas Marte - Voralberger Nachrichten. 

I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing a good two dozen different productions of Puccini’s operatic thriller Tosca. But this production at the 20th St. Gallen Festival was the most gripping, captivating, and textually precise of them all. (…) An electrifying production that held the audience spellbound for two and a half hours from the very first moment. It was breathtaking in its intensity. (…) Marcos Darbyshire has skillfully shifted the action from the brief period of the reactionary regime in Rome around 1800 to a dystopian fascism, a brutal surveillance state that no longer allows freedom of expression and monitors everyone and everything with dictatorship and terror. There is an oppressive atmosphere of intimidation, fear and conformity. (...) The murder of Scarpia by Tosca is very subtly staged. Scarpia sees through Tosca's intentions and hides the knife in his trouser pocket. But she grabs the wine bottle, smashes it on the edge of the desk (the desk of the “evil one” was the altar in the church in the first act ... that says it all!) and injures Scarpia with the shards. She finishes him off with the paperweight. (...) Quite simply an evening of superlatives that will resonate for a long time.

Kaspar Sannemann – deropernfreund.de