Opera Australia takes over Margaret Court arena for a season-launching Tosca

Opera Australia’s spectacular season-opening production of Puccini’s classic is being staged on a famous tennis arena.

Opera Australia artistic director Jo Davies on the set of Tosca. Picture: Arsineh Houspian

As the home of the Australian Open tennis slam, Margaret Court Arena is no stranger to emotional displays of jealousy and passion. But for a week from Friday, it will elicit those emotions not from the intestinal fire of international sporting greats, but from the score of one of the world’s greatest classical composers – Giacomo Puccini.

Opera Australia on Friday night will open its 2024 Victorian season with the Australian premiere of Puccini’s Tosca, directed by British theatre-maker Edward Dick.

Gone are the red velvet seats and gold frescoes of Melbourne’s State Theatre, which is being renovated. Instead, operagoers can expect plastic foldable chairs, towering columns of concrete and the possibility of a run-in with an AFL fan en route to the Melbourne Cricket Ground next door.

It is, says artistic director Jo Davies, an unlikely match. But one she expects opera fans to embrace.

“I feel really excited by it,” Davies says. “I love tennis, I love watching it and occasionally even play it. I think it’s interesting to contemplate that opera can exist in different spaces. I think there are different ways of interpreting things. If you put them into different spaces they take on a different energy and you attract a different audience. Maybe we’ll get more people who love the tennis, who just fancy what it would be like to see opera in the space. It’s an exciting experiment.”

Inspired by the way opera is being presented and performed overseas in places such as Berlin and London, Davies’s choice of venue reflects her aim to have an eye on the future.

“There’s a lot of things like this happening in Europe at the moment. There are operas going into stadiums or operas being performed in carparks or big outdoor fields,” she says.

Margaret Court Arena, which will be transformed from a tennis venue to a 3000-seat theatre, hosted a record 1,020,763 fans for January’s Australian Open.

Davies says, however, operagoers should not expect to find any sign of an umpire chair or a scoreboard. That furniture will make way for a raked stage featuring a suspended gilded dome of a renaissance fresco, a raised stage for the orchestra and a giant proscenium arch to replicate the way the stage would look in a traditional theatre.

The arena will be transformed, with the team from Opera Australia bringing in everything from the rigging, the trussing, the lighting, the sound rig and batons to fly the scenery.

The orchestra and set will take their places on platforms built over the tennis court, and the audience will sit in a horseshoe arrangement to view the stage. Reduced from its usual 7500-person capacity, the space will be cut in half.

This bold experiment comes a fortnight after Opera Australia recorded a $4.9 million operating loss in its annual report. The company’s box office takings reportedly dropped from $79.9 million in 2022 to $65.7 million in 2023.

After facing criticism last year over an imbalance in programming between Melbourne and Sydney – no staged operas have been held by the company in Melbourne since La Traviata in May 2022 – Davies says she wanted to bring something special to the Victorian capital.

“I want to have as many performances in Melbourne as we possibly can,” she says.

But faced with the closure of the State Theatre for refurbishment until 2027 as part of $1.7bn redevelopment of the Melbourne arts precinct, Davies had to get creative.

Opera Australia's Tosca will be staged at Margaret Court Arena in Melbourne.

“We looked at a whole host of different alternative venues but we chose Margaret Court Arena. When you see it set up as a theatre space it’s really interesting, there’s an intimacy to it,” she says.

Opera Australia’s knack for transforming unusual spaces into temporary theatres has been seen before with its annual Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour, which features a floating pontoon, as well as projects such as the Opera Gala at Uluru, Carmen on Cockatoo Island, and Opera on the Beach, which saw OA stage Mozart’s The Magic Flute on Coolangatta Beach on the Gold Coast. But the transformation is a first for Melbourne.

“The thing that’s exciting about doing it in Melbourne and opening it in Melbourne as well, which feels really important to me, is that we’re building the theatre as well as building the production,” says ­Davies. After seeing the space, Davies knew just the production fit for the space.

“I was looking at the space and thinking about Puccini because it is the 100th anniversary of his death and I remembered a really incredible production of Tosca that I had seen that Edward Dick directed for Opera North, which was designed for a stadium setting,” she explains.

“The piece itself and the production are very brilliant at exploring the psychological dynamics between political players. It’s a fabulous political thriller.” Touted as a quirky and modern take on Puccini’s classic, Dick’s Tosca focuses on exploring age-old issues of politics, religion and human relationships, and presents them to a modern audience. Alongside cutting-edge lighting design inspired by the likes of Kanye West’s set at Glastonbury in 2015, the production is certainly a step removed from when it was first performed in 1900.

Puccini’s classic was written to take place amid the turmoil of Napoleonic Rome and follows the tempestuous relationship between the fiery diva Tosca, her devoted lover Cavaradossi, and the sinister Scarpia over 24 hours.

But in Dick’s production the action is set in an unspecified contemporary nation where collusion between the church and state pushes up against the lives of the characters, allowing audiences to draw their own parallels.

“Puccini wrote the piece with the setting of the Napoleonic War happening in the background, but I personally don’t think he was very interested in that.

He needed to have a setting but what I think he was really looking at was human behaviour, timeless archetypal human behaviour,” Dick says.

“It’s our job as theatremakers to present that to the audience in the most direct and powerful way possible, with as little interference as possible. So we strip out a lot of extraneous details about the war and we put the piece into this nameless, timeless place in which human behaviour is acted out.”

Fireworks at Handa Opera's Madama Butterfly on Sydney Harbour in 2023. Picture Keith Saunders

Dick, who has travelled from England to oversee the OA production, is excited by the possibility of staging such an epic opera in a stadium setting. “The music demands scale and spectacle. I think the scale only works in our favour,” he says. Dick’s show also goes to great lengths to represent and celebrate the strength of Tosca. His Tosca is a formidable force who takes fate into her own hands.

Says Davies: “It deals with a woman who has incredible faith and is caught up in these political machinations of state and finally feels totally abandoned by her god so she takes action into her own hands. She’s a very forward-thinking, bold female protagonist. That’s why I love the piece.”

Davies is the first woman to hold the position of artistic director at Opera Australia. Since her appointment, OA says the company has seen an increase in the percentage of female creatives, including BAFTA-winning costume designer Fotini Dimitou, who works on this production.

But staging an opera in a space best served for tennis matches is no small feat. This is something OA technical director Chris Yates knows all too well. Work on plans to adapt the scenery, the lighting and the sound to suit the arena started more than 10 months ago.

“It’s very much a bare walls space, so there’s no infrastructure in terms of putting on a theatrical event in a space like a tennis centre,” Yates explains. “Basically, we have to build all of the infrastructure which commonly exists in a traditional theatre, so there’s quite a bit more activity than usual.”

Even though the space will look like a traditional theatre once audiences are inside, there are some key differences from a usual opera performance the team has had to embrace. Instead of a traditional opera house set-up where the orchestra is in front of the stage, the orchestra will perform on an elevated platform behind the singers. There will also be microphones, usually a taboo in live opera, in order to project the voices of the singers throughout the space.

The announcement of the venue raised a number of questions about how the space will fare if the weather turns, but Davies wants to make clear it has everything one might expect from a traditional theatrical environment.

“It will have incredible lighting, extraordinary sound, fabulous ­costu­mes, incredible design – and, yes, also a roof,” she says.

The production will feature both local and international talent, with Australian favourite Karah Son and British star Nadine Benjamin alternating as Tosca. Diego Torre will return as Cavarodossi, sharing the role with Young Woo Kim.

Opera Australia’s Toscaruns from May 24-30.