THE QUEEN OF SPADES

29 May - 4 July 2025

Tchaikovsky’s intensely dramatic opera is a tragedy about the remorseless nature of fate, brought to life with music on a grand scale. This production sees the return of Jack Furness, Tom Piper and Douglas Boyd after their triumphant Rusalka in 2022 which later opened the Edinburgh International Festival. The production revels in the opulence of the St Petersburg we saw at the end of Tom Piper’s 2016 Eugene Onegin as this passionate thriller unfolds.

Hermann is a soldier in St. Petersburg, isolated from his fellow officers by his strange and obsessive behaviour. He is in love with Lisa, who tentatively returns his love but is engaged to another man. Lisa is the ward of an elderly, eccentric Countess, the toast of Paris society in her long-ago youth, rumoured to possess the knowledge of a winning combination of three cards. Having once confided that secret to two men, she was warned by an apparition that she would die at the hands of a third if she ever revealed the secret again. Hermann becomes fixated on the Countess and her three cards. He can think of nothing else and will do whatever is necessary to discover the secret.

Sung in Russian with English supertitles