La Didone

Published Wednesday 22 August 2007 at 15:15 by Thom Dibdin

Combining the Science Fiction schlock of Mario Baba’s 1965 movie Planet of the Vampires with the refined Baroque strains of Cavalli’s 1641 opera Didone, The Wooster Group have created a piece that is almost designed to split its audience.

For opera purists, the amplification of the singers, the acoustic manipulation of their voices and the intrusion of spoken word over their arias could be anathema.

SF Fans could be as easily miffed by a piece that by turning ghastly vampiric aliens into mythic godlike purveyors of an ethereal music does not feed on Cold War paranoia, but actively embraces the arrival of the new and promotes coexistence and, dare say, evolution.

Those who are not thus hidebound are free gaze in amazement at a piece of theatre which works on many, many levels. Which is due as much to the technical competence of the Group as to the genius of their vision.

Ruud van den Akker’s set evokes both the claustrophobia of the spaceship and the space inhabited by the alien beings from another dimension.

The combining of video with live action is done in a manner that both accentuates the difference and yet seems seamless.

The live rendition of the musical accompaniment, which introduces electric guitar to Baroque guitar and theorbo, is completely appropriate to this ethereal world. Indeed, it stands on its own as a piece of music incorporating two found scores and re-imagined acoustically for a specific space.

In simple storytelling terms, the imagining of the Dido and Aeneus myth as that of a multidimensional alien species, using humankind on the physical plane to move about the universe, is clearly told.