Murderer or Madonna?

At the end of Act Two of Tosca there are some 30 bars of orchestral music — accompaniment to a very specific set of stage directions. During this time Tosca takes two candles and places them on either side of the dead Scarpia’s head. She then removes a crucifix from the wall and lays it on his chest. The tableau is a messy, bloody one, but the message is clear: here the politics of religion and the religion of politics are one and the same. A pietà or the body of a thug? A murderer or a Madonna? It’s all just a matter of spin.

In a year of embattled Supreme Court nominations and moral muscle-flexing by our own DUP, Edward Dick’s new, 21st-century Tosca for Opera North relishes these slippery elisions and entanglements of church and state. A nifty piece of set design by Tom Scutt helps blur things further. As those crashing opening trombone chords come down, the stage is suddenly and blazingly illuminated to reveal the escaped Angelotti (in prisons scrubs) slithering down a rope through a Pantheon-style cupola into the church. A gilded Magdalene and votive candles speak of the spiritual, but just behind them are ranks of electric bulbs shouting something quite different. Crime scene or film set? Either way, nothing here is private, nothing is sacred. Even the climactic Mass is more political rally than act of worship, the cloying incense barely covering the sour smell of ambition.

Dick’s updating comes into its own in Act Two. No messing about here: we’re in Scarpia’s bedroom (blandly slick bachelor pad — chrome, velvet, drinks trolley). The frescoed cupola remains, watching over a properly skin-crawling game of sexual cat-and-mouse between Robert Hayward’s Scarpia (a man first, then a villain) and Giselle Allen’s Tosca.