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.