Dido, Queen of Carthage
Cottesloe
The Overcoat
Lyric Hammersmith
Simple plays can be the hardest to get right. James Macdonald has made a dogged assault on the earliest work of Christopher Marlowe. The story is lifted wholesale from Virgil. After Troy’s fall Aeneas arrives in Carthage where Dido promptly falls in love with him. When destiny compels Aeneas to leave for Italy the despairing queen sets fire to herself, and her palace, in a humungous health-and-safety fiasco. Marlowe’s underdeveloped grasp of personality weakens the script. Both major plot-twists — Dido’s infatuation and Aeneas’s departure — are contrived by the gods not by the characters themselves, and this lack of psychological complexity isn’t compensated for by the verse and its occasional flashes of loveliness. The production looks like a rush job done on a nuppence budget.
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