By Nick Dent
Dido and Aeneas
Playhouse, QPAC, until July 27
★★★★
Some operas – romantic ones – drag on for hours. Not so the one surviving opera by baroque English composer Henry Purcell; it usually comes in at under an hour, and is no less beloved for it.
Dido and Aeneas, thought to have been composed around 1688, dramatises a story from Virgil’s Aeneid, the pre-Christian saga about a Trojan hero who survives that nasty business with the wooden horse, heads off on an epic journey and becomes the ancestor of Rome.
Dido and Aeneas brings Opera Queensland singers and Circa acrobats together on stage again after the success of their 2019 collaboration Orpheus and Eurydice.Credit: David Kelly
Aeneas (Sebastian Maclaine), here a tuxedo-wearing smoothie, is blown off course by the gods and winds up in Carthage, where he wins the heart of the queen Dido (Anna Dowsley), here an orange-haired vamp in a black sequined evening gown.
But a scheming sorceress has other plans and sees to it that our hero breaks the queen’s heart by resuming his travels. And that’s pretty much all there is to the story.
Purcell’s score is a series of relatively brief arias separated by longer instrumental sections, which is where the 10-strong Circa ensemble comes in to work its magic. Clad by costume designer Libby McDonnell in identical black lace tops and black satin trousers, they perform leaps, tumbles, tight rope and trapeze. They climb up each other’s bodies and form human pillars. The eroticism and danger of some of their stunts is completely belied by the formal precision of the score performed by a slimline Queensland Symphony Orchestra under Benjamin Bayl, with the Continuo Ensemble joining in on harpsichord and baroque guitar.
Anna Dowsley (Dido) and Sebastian Maclaine (Aeneas) sing the title roles.Credit: David Kelly
The acrobats’ clambering figures on the bare stage do the work that an elaborate set would normally do. They are at once character, landscape and the embodiment of emotion.
“Let the triumph of love and beauty be shown,” sings the chorus, and that promise is completely fulfilled in what is a gorgeously sinister display of pageantry under the direction of Circa director Yaron Lifschitz.
While Maclaine’s Aeneas has a few moments to shine along with Katie Stenzel as Dido’s handmaiden Belinda, Dowsley dominates the performance as both Dido and her own nemesis. When the evil sorceress makes her entrance, Dowsley creepily sheds her skin and hair to reveal the self-sabotaging reptile within.
The opera’s most famous sequence comes at the end in the sublime Dido’s Lament – a piece made famous by interpretations by everyone from Joan Sutherland to Jeff Buckley.
Fittingly, this is where chorus and dancers leave Dowsley alone on the stage to implore the audience to “remember me but forget my fate”. After 80 minutes of astonishment, it’s unlikely anyone in the audience would.