The Stage

After Dido

Published Monday 20 April 2009 at 10:35 by George Hall

Katie Mitchell’s production, in which ENO collaborates with the Young Vic, mingles actors with singers in one of her trademark stagings incorporating live video of the naturalistic action, some of it minutely observed, which appears on a screen above the stage. Christian Curnyn conducts a small ensemble hidden away to the right.

The premise is that the action takes place this year in London, with Purcell’s opera being broadcast live on the radio. From a Purcellian point of view, the result is to make his work into a kind of background commentary, with poetry even read above the orchestral score at times. In the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the singing - even from such notable performers as Sue Bickley, who doubles as Dido and the Sorceress - registers as a muted add-on and not as the heart of the evening. A recording would have done just as well.

Above and beyond, we see four individuals in crises of loss and despair, their emotional states explored without much context for their obvious depression. The withdrawn, solitary young woman who prepares a meal for herself before taking her suicide pills in a kind of ritual, all to the undeniably affecting accompaniment of Dido’s Lament, is finely realised by Amanda Hale, although ultimately neither she nor the other characters need Purcell’s music as a background to the presentation of their individual sorrows.