★★★★☆
Whatever a production’s quirks, Tosca the opera obstinately remains Tosca. Even if a director did set the thing in a service station on the M1, Puccini and his librettists would still serve the same lethal cocktail of sex, power, brute force and religion, bluntly laid out in words and music written not with a pen, but carved with a scalpel.
At first Edward Dick’s new staging for Opera North might seem a period affair, bustling under the designer Tom Scutt’s suspended and decorative church dome. Then you note the sacristan’s takeaway food bag, clothing with zips, Tosca’s sunglasses. Modernity reaches a climax in Act II with the lustfully villainous Scarpia’s black laptop, on which Tosca, his diva dreamgirl, is able to see footage