ETO's Ariadne and Dido double bill reviewed: bold staging, muted queen — SkimNews
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- English Touring Opera opens its mythological autumn season with a double bill pairing Purcell's 'Dido and Aeneas' with Elena Langer's 20-minute 'Ariadne' scene (text by Glyn Maxwell, premiered by Almeida Opera in 2002), touring alongside Gluck's 'Orfeo ed Euridice'.
- Jessica Cale sings the Ariadne monologue in Anna Morrissey's production, with the staging expanding the solo scene to six performers and opening with Theseus disentangling himself from the sleeping Ariadne and a red thread spooling from the floor.
- Elena Langer scores 'Ariadne' for four instruments — oboe, violin, viola and cello — performed without a conductor in what the reviewer calls high sonorities that 'suggest the play of light on waves'.
- Rebecca Meltzer directs 'Dido and Aeneas' against Alex Berry's set of black rocks and frosted glass panels, costuming most of the cast in charcoal blazers and pleated skirts and giving the action a 'playground dynamic'.
- Lydia Shariff's Sorceress is staged with the body language of 'a year eight queen bee', and Isabelle Atkinson's Belinda dons tiny sunglasses to join the witches as Dido is, in the reviewer's words, 'gaslit and bullied into her downfall' with the whole chorus complicit.
- Samantha Price sings the title role of Dido with expressive commitment, but the reviewer argues that framing her as a victim from the start removes the sense of a queen being 'brought low by the collision between human passion and the whim of the gods'.
Why it matters: An opera review that finds strong staging choices let down by a reading of Dido that strips the character of her stature — a cautionary case for directors weighing modern psychological readings against the tragic weight Purcell built into the role.
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