After Dido (Young Vic, 16/4/09)

I think the critics are going to be hedging their bets with this one (see Barry Millington in the Evening Standard for example). The emotional force delivered by a combination of Purcell's music and powerful acting has to be weighed against the wilful complexity of a production which offers multi-layered realities but only a one-dimensional narrative.

After Dido is English National Opera's latest collaboration with the Young Vic and director Katie Mitchell. Very little of the nature of the production had been given away in advance - even the programme leaflet was sparse - so one was not quite sure what to expect. This certainly isn't a production of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. The opera in many ways acts only as mood music to a series of tableaux, filmed in real time on stage and projected above the stage, depicting a set of contemporary Londoners dealing individually with unspoken tales of grief and loss.

It took some while to work out what to focus on - the big screen, the singers, the actors on stage or the process of filming them and the devious trickery involved (one could probably have spent an enjoyable evening watching how all the sound effects were created). In the end the screen won, but the activity on stage was always vying for attention. In this piece, Mitchell heightens the unreality of theatre (and indeed film) several times over. Is this the future of theatre? I don't think so - it's not even trying to be theatre. It's an exploration of what can happen when different media, and different art forms, collide and boundaries blur. An intriguing experiment that by its nature is never going to fully satisfy anyone, but by virtue of some outstanding performances (Susan Bickley's Dido and Sandy McDade's grieving widow in particular) it possesses considerable expressive power.

See Mark Berry's more substantial review here. A contrasting view from The Teenage Theatre Critic here. And an interview with Katie Mitchell here.

Update 20/4/09: the weekend reviews are in, and while the consensus is a positive one, it's by no means unanimous - five stars in the Indy, four from The Times, three from The Telegraph, and two from the Guardian, which in a rather bizarre two-header, missed the point by getting Michael Billington to comment on the theatrical aspects and Tim Ashley to write about the operatic performance. Just found a rather brilliant commentary on the commentary here.