In 2018, Giselle Allen received rave reviews when she created the title role in Edward Dick’s new production of Tosca for Opera North. When she returned to the production last year, similar accolades followed, and it’s easy to see why.

Allen’s Floria Tosca is a wonderfully capricious creation; a haughty, self-absorbed prima donna one minute and tragic heroine the next.

Her mercurial performance is matched by her vocal attack, which bends to her will with ease, ensuring that her tear-jerking Vissi d’arte is as tender and plaintive as her murderous shrieks are blood-curdling. Here is a singer who isn’t afraid to act or get her hands dirty.

Young Woo Kim as Cavaradossi and Giselle Allen as Tosca in Opera Australia’s Tosca at the Sydney Opera House. Photo © Keith Saunders

Allen spends much of Act Two being thrown about the stage in a game of cat and mouse with Gevorg Hakobyan’s chilling Scarpia, leaping over furniture and writhing on the floor of his nouveau-riche pad after he attempts to rape her.

No, it isn’t easy to watch, nor should it be.

Hakobyan’s sadistic chief of police is typical of the oafish class that strays dangerously...