ARTSMONDAY: Taste of Ashes in 'Dido'

Dido, Queen of Carthage

Location: Loeb Drama Center

Dates: March 5-26

Director: Neil Bartlett

“Where we are is hell, and where hell is, must we ever be.” So wrote Christopher Marlowe for Doctor Faustus, though the line would be equally fitting for the wracked souls of his later work, Dido, Queen of Carthage.

Though ordinarily the myth of Dido and Aeneas plays as tragedy or romance, with Christopher Marlowe’s verse and Neil Bartlett’s direction, Dido, which plays through March 26 at the Loeb Drama Center, becomes more of a psychological horror story. The play keeps the audience transfixed yet repelled by the demonic passions of its characters and the equally demonic gods deciding their fate.

In this particular production, love becomes a horrible, sinister thing, more akin to a drug addiction or a form of psychosis than a force of benevolence or good will. Love turns mortals and gods into goblins and monsters, livid contortions of their former selves with impossible cravings leading to their own self-destruction.

Marlowe’s script adheres closely to Virgil’s original text in the Aeneid, beginning with the political and sexual squabbles of the Olympian gods in the aftermath of the Trojan War, in which Venus, mother of Aeneas, favored the Trojans while Juno aided the Greeks.

Jupiter is badgered by both, first allowing Aeneas and the Trojan refugees to capsize in Juno’s storm but then granting them safety on Carthaginian stores. Venus, hoping to cure her son’s life-endangering wanderlust, sends Cupid to shoot an arrow of love into Dido.

Bad idea: Aeneas is far too scarred by memories of carnage and survivor’s guilt to settle down for long, while Dido is too strong-willed to take “no” for an answer. Aeneas uses Dido’s love to fortify his ships and companions, then deserts Dido to seek the promised land of Italy and build a “new Troy,” the Roman empire. Dido, crazed by despair, burns herself to death, driving those who love her to similar fates.

Two fires frame Dido, Queen of Carthage: the burning of sacked Troy and Dido’s funeral pyre. Ray Smith’s highly stylized design hides both from view, though periodically between scenes we hear the haunting crackle of unseen flames. Smith’s concept of invisible flames works as theatrical genius, making fire itself one of the many ghosts in hot pursuit of Aeneas and the Trojans. It also allows room for the internal but equally violent blazes of the half-maddened mortals to burn all the more horribly onstage.

Presiding over this inferno is the creepily complacent Cupid, played by John Kelly with mesmerizing deliberateness. Far from the cherubic toddler of Valentine’s Day, this pale, stealthy god takes malevolent pleasure in characters’ seduction and subsequent destruction.

Marlowe’s play calls for Cupid to sing two unspecified songs, which composer Laura Jeppensen chose to arrange from Marlowe’s own poetry. Jeppensen’s otherworldly countertenor compositions create some of the most riveting moments of the play and capture its cold cruelty with lines such as: “Love is not full of pity as men say/… Then darkness falls; dark night is Cupid’s day.”

With these songs and a marvelous spoken performance, Cupid practically steals the show from the mythical heroine he dooms.

Lest the audience seek any respite in the comfort of the everyday world, the setting of Dido, Queen of Carthage looks and feels as dark and cold as outer space. When in one scene Dido, Aeneas, and their courtiers go hunting, the sudden appearance of staged “daylight” is beautifully painful, revealing vulnerable men and women so damaged by reality that they seem more at home in the gold-and-black no-place of the remaining scenes.

What Bartlett’s cast lacks in the way of scenery and props, they compensate with expressive stage movements that give the play the violent elegance of a bullfight. Even without taking a step, characters’ postures speak volumes: Aeneas (Colin Lane) looks every inch the shell-shocked military man, while Dido (Diane D’Aquila) transforms from self-possessed stateswoman to wounded animal.

At once infernal and frozen, violent and funereal, Dido, Queen of Carthage is as fantastic as it is eerie. Audiences leave the theatre feeling slightly voyeuristic, having been privy to the raw and tortured ids of the desperate characters. Dido turns viewers into armchair pyromaniacs, riveted to the literal and psychological fires that consume the stage for an unrelenting two hours. We leave the blackened stage much as Aeneas must have left the charred ruins of Troy: tortured and haunted, with a taste of ashes in our mouths.

—Reviewer Laura E. Kolbe can be reached at lkolbe@fas.harvard.edu.