After Dido

Synopsis

A live music and film performance inspired by Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. Taking the universal themes within Dido and Aeneas, the production focuses on four contemporary urban stories of grief, lost love, departure and death, which unfold in separate locations onstage. Using multi-media technology, cameras operated by the singers and actors cut between the narratives to focus and reveal significant details, which are projected live as part of the performance.

Our Review:

17 April 2009

Katie Mitchell and Director of Photography Leo Warner have sliced through the difficulties with an almost wholly successful staging that dispenses with coherent narrative while bombarding the senses. They have treated theatre classics this way before but it’s a first for opera.

Unlike Deborah Warner and Phyllida Lloyd, Mitchell hasn’t quite established herself in the opera world. There was a none-too-successful St Matthew Passion at Glyndebourne last year and before that a nicely-conceived Jephtha for WNO/ENO. She now moves away from the staged oratorio to blow the cobwebs off England’s first so-named opera.

We’re backstage at the recording of a live, through-played film in territory not a million miles away from Anthony Minghella’s Truly, Madly, Deeply. Actors play out three contemporary stories of loss and grief against a background (and opera-lovers may feel frustrated at the composer’s constant ...

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Latest User Review

fred - 26 April 2009:

Katie Mitchell is a remarkable director. Her innovative productions at the National Theatre, most recently "The Waves", have been thrilling. Her startling use of film has enabled her to illuminate a play in a way which is impossible in conventional theatre. I assume that her aim in 'After Dido' is to illuminate 'Dido and Aeneas' by contemporary scenes of loss and grief. However, although there are some typically visually stunning moments, the evening does not succeed in its aim because (as so often with singers), it is simply not possible to hear the words that are being sung with the result that, if she is contrasting what is being sung about with what we see in the film, the audience is denied the opportunity to understand that this is waht she is doing. Also, the pieces that are read are done so in such hushed tones that it is not possible to hear what is being said. Surtitles would have helped a great deal although they should not be necessary. ...

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