Dido’s life on camera

It is 350 years since Henry Purcell was born and his music is, gloriously, being played and sung all around the country. And there are a lot of different Didos about: Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage at the National Theatre; Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas pretty much all day on BBC Radio Three a couple of weekends ago; at the Royal Opera House in a joint venture by the Royal Opera and the Royal Ballet directed and choreographed by Wayne McGregor (see review page 38); and, in another joint venture, by English National Opera and the Young Vic, as After Dido, directed by Katie Mitchell.

Gerard Manley Hopkins rhymes Purcell with rehearsal but I don’t think he could have imagined the space in which I meet Katie Mitchell during a break in the sixth week of a seven-week preparation period. There are banks of video and sound recording equipment and, fitted in like pieces of a jigsaw, three miniature film sets — a kitchen, a bedroom and a study with slatted blinds.

Smiling seraphically, a still point in the midst of all this, Mitchell explains that the idea for After Dido came about when ENO’s artistic director, John Berry, contacted her after seeing her production of The Waves in 2006. She had used live film and sound to reflect the way in which, in Virginia Woolf’s novel, key moments are captured in a series of recurring images. ‘He initiated a conversation about whether there might be a way of using some of those techniques in the presentation of an opera. That was a wonderfully brave and experimental gesture and, when I thought about it, the first piece that came to my mind was Dido.’

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