The ill-fated Queen of Scots has always exerted a powerful fascination: she has appeared on stage, film and television and in countless novels and biographies. Donizetti's opera offers a great singing-actress untold opportunities. Mary portrays a memorable range of human emotion in the scenes leading to her execution - optimism, regret, love, remorse, despair and in the climactic scene of the fictitious encounter with her persecutor, Elizabeth I, the royal pride and defiance that are her undoing.