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Theatre Review Sykes and Co turn Marlowe into a theatrical gem

Gordon Parsons reviews Dido, Queen of Carthage, at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon

The question for any director of Christopher Marlowe’s rarely performed early play, which reads like a dramatic poem, is how to create a work of living theatre. Kimberley Sykes and her creative team have succeeded brilliantly.

Marlowe gives his own slant to the episode in Virgil’s Aeneid where the Trojan Aeneas, escaping from the destruction of his native city and its people, finds himself and his band shipwrecked on the coast of Queen Dido’s Carthage, now Libya.

Marlowe, reputed to have been an atheist, never had much time for God or the gods in general. His play opens depicting Olympus as a naughty school playground with the headmaster Jupiter engaged in highly questionable behaviour with a youthful Ganymede and berated by his daughter Venus for leaving her son Aeneas to his fate on Earth rather than pursuing his mission to reach Italy and found Rome.

The humans on Earth are clearly the playthings of the gods and their childlike political wrangling. Rivals Venus and Juno agree to keep Aeneas in Carthage by getting Cupid to use his dart to make Dido fall in love with him.

This is no Antony and Cleopatra. When Hermes is sent by Jupiter to remind Sandy Grierson’s rather bewildered Aeneas of his destiny, he quickly ditches the bereft queen and leaves her to the self-sacrificial fire.

If for a modern audience this may seem something of a meaningless romp, the acting — particularly Chipo Chung’s Dido — brings a moving depth to her tragic role, carries the play, while the Marlovian language at times touches levels that rival the best of Shakespeare. Grierson’s elegiac lament, narrating the fall and destruction of Troy and its inhabitants, is a dramatic aria that holds the audience for minutes in its hypnotic relived horror.

Sykes and her team remind us that reality is not far away when Aeneas and his friends cling to one another having survived the Mediterranean crossing, and all those scenes of desperate refugees are inevitably brought to mind.

This may not be a box office draw but the RSC have created a theatrical gem.

Until October 28. Box office (01789) 403-493.

 

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