Dido, Queen of Carthage
Cottesloe
The Overcoat
Lyric Hammersmith
Simple plays can be the hardest to get right. James Macdonald has made a dogged assault on the earliest work of Christopher Marlowe. The story is lifted wholesale from Virgil. After Troy’s fall Aeneas arrives in Carthage where Dido promptly falls in love with him. When destiny compels Aeneas to leave for Italy the despairing queen sets fire to herself, and her palace, in a humungous health-and-safety fiasco. Marlowe’s underdeveloped grasp of personality weakens the script. Both major plot-twists — Dido’s infatuation and Aeneas’s departure — are contrived by the gods not by the characters themselves, and this lack of psychological complexity isn’t compensated for by the verse and its occasional flashes of loveliness. The production looks like a rush job done on a nuppence budget. An assured burst of visual charm is needed to sweep us into Marlowe’s mythical neverland. Instead, we get a maisonette. The gods are upstairs behind a yellow drape representing Elysium. The mortals are down below in front of a blackboard partly painted purple. The continent of Africa is suggested by a spillage of mauve granules on the floor. And the detached-retina school of design has been busy in Wardrobe, too. Ganymede wears punk trousers. Winged Mercury has feathers in his ears. Siobhan Redmond’s buxom Venus trembles beneath a Statue of Liberty robe. The Trojans have Elizabethan costumes but the Carthaginians are on their way to a Star Trek convention, and they do that special salute (kiss fist, touch heart) which in sci-fi films indicates the Civilised Alien.
Could great acting lift this muddle heavenwards? Mark Bonnar has a handsome, even a noble head, which surmounts a squat, stubby prop-forward’s body. A useful companion if you want a door forced open but there’s no heroism or profundity in his earnest, wounded Aeneas.
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