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by Henry Purcell, directed by Patrick Eakin Young

Opera Erratica, Winchester Street Theatre, Toronto

August 18-29, 2009

Opera Erratica has joined forces with the Classical Music Consort to form “Underground/Opera,” a project that aims to use new media to re-invigorate the multi-media art form that is opera.  Currently they are presenting a fascinating production of Henry Purcell’s 1689 masterpiece Dido and Aeneas that combines the CMC’s playing of Purcell’s music on authentic instruments with modern costumes and staging and a projected video background created by Patrick Eakin Young.  If this sounds familiar, it’s because at last year’s Fringe Festival, Young and conductor Ashiq Aziz approached Handel’s Acis and Galatea the same way to much acclaim.

Young’s take on Purcell’s opera is to present the action from the point of view of Belinda (Charlotte Corwin), the faithful servant of Dido, Queen of Carthage (Susanne Hawkins), who falls hopelessly in love with Aeneas (Olivier Laquerre), the Trojan whose destiny is to found Rome.  Thus, in this play of memories, the video background is filled with shadows and phantoms, sometime reflecting what the characters do on stage, sometimes dancing their wilder thoughts as they remain stationary.  In this hour-long work, Young can use this technique to give the characters greater psychological depth or to create comic effects as when a drunken sailor finds that his shadow can dance a better hornpipe than he can.           

       

The playing of the CMC under Aziz wonderfully crisp and taut.  Hawkins gives an exquisitely sensitive performance of Dido’s two famous arias.  The rich-voiced Laquerre infuses Aeneas with much more sympathy than is common.  Corwin’s pure-voiced Belinda gives even her happiest songs a tinge of melancholy.  Counter-tenor Andrew Pickett makes an eerily unnerving Sorceress.  The one distracting element is Young’s use of the surtitles screen not for the opera’s English text but for his own commentary from Belinda’s viewpoint on the action.  The remarks add nothing that is not already implied by his direction, and, luckily, can easily be ignored.  Otherwise, Young’s conception is well thought-out, blending the gorgeous music-making of the instrumental ensemble, singers and chorus with an insightful re-envisioning of the story.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-08-21.

Photo: Susanne Hawkins and Olivier Laquerre. ©Patrick Eakin Young.