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Dir: Jonathan Miller.
Cast: New London Consort, Philip Pickett (cond), Julia Gooding (Dido), Michael George (Aeneas), Joanna Lunn (Belinda)
Description: Jonathan Miller directs a new performing edition of Purcell's tale of a Trojan prince and his love for the queen of Carthage. By Peter Holman and Philip Pickett with Julia Gooding as Dido, Michael George as Aeneas and Joanna Lunn as Belinda.
Trains: Tube: Sloane Square 
Phone: 0207730 4500
Website: www.cadoganhall.com
Extra info: Pub, Party Hire
Complciated: Dido and Aeneas could have been simpler
Little is known of the origins of Purcell's short opera, Dido and Aeneas, though it's usually assumed that it was first performed at a girls' boarding school in Chelsea run by a dancing master named Josias Priest.
So it was appropriate that the capacious rattle-bag which is the Chelsea Festival chose to mount the premiere of a new performing edition by Philip Pickett and Peter Holman, directed by Jonathan Miller.
Here the work has been 'reconstructed' as it might have been enjoyed not in Chelsea but further east in the more rumbustious, less genteel environment of Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre. There's evidence that, around 1700, Purcell's music was broken up and played during Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, which sounds a truly terrible idea.
So Pickett has found new music for a Prologue and his excellent New London Consort has swollen to include kettle-drum, slide trumpet and serpent, an early bassoon described by connoisseurs as sounding like a large animal in distress.
The result was an intriguing experiment but dramatically unbalanced. Purcell's study of the relationship between the Queen of Carthage and her brutish lover who makes his excuses and founds Rome is finely poised between light and dark, culminating in Dido's celebrated lament, 'When I am laid in earth.' When we reached that magnificent point, despite Julia Gooding's noble, touching performance, its force seemed blunted.
Joanne Lunn was a pure-voiced Belinda. Michael George sang efficiently as Aeneas. There were some lively mixed-sex witches, speaking cod cockney and wearing peculiar black hoodies which looked more like mufty for Augustinian monks.
We are all waiting for Jonathan Miller's proper return to the London theatre after years of eclipse but this minimal, let's-just-wander-around staging was not it, despite overblown advance fanfares. One suspects his name was too valuable a publicity tool to resist, and Cadogan Hall was full. A simple concert performance would have done just as well, and made greater sense of Purcell's sublime music.
www.chelseafestival.org ; 0845 890 2435
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
