Purcell puzzle

Michael Tanner

Wednesday, 22nd April 2009

After Dido
Young Vic

Il trovatore
Royal Opera House

For the third collaboration between ENO and the Young Vic Katie Mitchell and her team ‘direct a new work using multi-media techniques to create a synergy of music, theatre and film, inspired by, and incorporating, the full score of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas’. Fortunately, the performance of Dido is a very good one, superior in crucial respects to the recent Royal Opera’s effort. Christian Curnyn, who conducts from the keyboard, is flexible in tempi and phrasing, so the tiny opera proceeds with a convincing naturalness, and the singers, discreetly miked, are uniformly excellent. Susan Bickley, doubling as Dido and the Sorceress, doesn’t have a large or glamorous voice, and can be a bit short-winded, but she still manages to create a regal effect through purely vocal means. And the Aeneas, Adam Green, has a rich voice which does what can be done to make this wooden part a little more sympathetic. So I came away from the theatre with strong positive feelings about the musical side of the evening, but undiluted contempt for the other components in the synergy.

After Dido, it appears, there have been and still are many women who kill themselves because they have been betrayed in love. That isn’t news to anyone, surely, but it would need to be to justify the visual components of this production. The stage contains not only the nine-piece orchestra and the sound-effects apparatus, but also parts of several rooms of contemporary houses, and the actors filming one another, the results being projected on a large screen that hangs above the stage. One doesn’t see anyone singing, and the Witches and Sailors are invisible, but one does see Helen in her bedsit, Nell in her study, Anna in the kitchen, and their treacherous lovers. As Dido sings her lament, Helen sits at her desk, swallows her Nembutals and drinks her alcohol. There are lots of shots of kettles, taps, unmade beds, flowers outside in the sunlight, other things that one does quite often see. They don’t help to create a synergy, nor do the pained expressions of the actors. So much going on, and all that is needed to move us is the wonderful music, very simply staged.

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