IN this production, a merciful relief after Christopher Alden’s very strange deconstruction of the work back in 2009, John Bell makes a rare appearance on the opera directing scene with a vintage bit of Bell updating.

For this ‘Tosca meets The Third Reich version’, Bell has consulted the history books and discovered the for a  nine month period from 1943 to 1944, The Nazis occupied Rome, largely supported by police and the Catholic Church, though opposed by partisans and many members of the general populace.

It provides a pretty good parallel to the opera’s original setting in Napoleonic-era Rome and Isabel, and by updating it to the 40s he gives his creative a chance to pull out all the stops in the different areas of expertise. This new production will make a worthy addition to the Opera Australia repertoire.

Set designer Michael Scott-Mitchell, for instance recreates the Attavanti  Chapel in magnificent style, the perfect setting for Opera Australia’s ravishing chorus to bring Act I to a  climax with the ‘Te deum.”

In Act II he takes us to a grubbier, unknown corner of the Palazzo Farnese, for as “Tosca” fans know, each act is set in a real-life place, but it works in the Nazi context.

Costume designer Teresa  Negroponte comes up with a glamorous array of elegant clothes for Tosca and her lover Cavaradossi,  as well as a swathe of churchgoers, though they possibly owed more to the 30s than the 40s.

Bell’s directorial hand appears throughout Act II, where the  libidinous police chief  villain Baron Scarpia ends up dead on the floor wrapped in a Nazi flag. As well, the power hungry Scarpia,  played by John Wegner almost as John Bell might have played him—as a cool customer.

What is normally a larger-than-life character is thus reduced to a  conniving bureaucrat. Surely the menacing theme running through this act suggests something darker. As Tosca sings  her famous aria “Vissi d’arte” (I live for art) Scarpia is apparently taking a smoke outside, returning only just in time to respond to her pleas. We got the idea. “It’s the banality of evil,” as someone near me said.

In the final act the stage is at last left to the desperate lovers, Tosca, played with power and  passion by Greek soprano Alexia Voulgaridou and as Cavaradossi, Korean tenor Yonghoon Lee, whose full-blooded tenor voice drew gasps of approval.

Here the intense emotion Puccini’s  music takes over, and that is what the audience has come for.