It seemed, on the face of it, a bizarre idea: opera at the Margaret Court arena. And Opera Australia was facing the challenge of the State Theatre being closed for the next four years by taking a production by Edward Dick of Opera North in Britain of Puccini’s extraordinary musical melodrama Tosca – arguably the most dramatic work in the whole operatic canon – and presenting it on a raked stage with the orchestra playing above the action and with the latter stripped bare of the scenic fripperies of Rome at the time of the Napoleonic war.