The story of Dido and Aeneas is best known to British audiences through Purcell’s opera, Dido and Aeneas, but it first appeared on the English stage a century or so earlier, in what is considered to be Christopher Marlowe’s first play, Dido, Queen Of Carthage.
It is based on Virgil’s Aeneid, the epic poem commissioned by Emperor Augustus that tells how Aeneas sailed from vanquished Troy to found Rome. Along the way were various misadventures, chief among them being driven by a storm to Carthage, whose queen, Dido, fell in love with him.
Marlowe wrote the play after leaving Cambridge and it bristles with undergraduate swagger (he even retains a passage in the original Latin). Dido is his only female protagonist, which has led some critics to assign much of the work to his collaborator, Thomas Nashe. If so, Marlowe compensated with a prologue for Jupiter and his lover, Ganymede, which must rank as the gayest scene in English classical drama.
The play is often dismissed as an apprentice piece, but in Kimberley Sykes’s consummate production, it is as verbally and psychologically rich as Marlowe’s later work and exceeds all but Edward II in pathos.
Sykes’s masterstroke is to lampoon the gods while treating the human tragedy with absolute seriousness. This yields deliciously comic performances from Ellie Beaven, Ben Goffe and Will Bliss as the immortals and splendidly impassioned ones from Sandy Grierson, Amber James and Daniel York as the mortals.
Chipo Chung’s superb performance in the title role makes one wish that Marlowe and Nashe had collaborated further.
Like Aeneas and compatriots, the central characters in Marina Lewycka’s A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian are refugees. Nikolai, wife Ludmilla, and daughters, Vera and Nadia, escape the Soviet Union to Britain at the end of the Second World War. On Ludmilla’s death, 84-yearold Nikolai (depicted as one of Dostoyevsky’s holy fools), falls for Valentina, 36. She is from a new generation of Ukrainian exiles, fleeing not Stalin’s tyranny but post-Soviet corruption.
Manipulative and materialistic, she has nothing to recommend her but her ambition for her son.
Lewycka’s multi-stranded narrative sets a family drama, with Nikolai’s daughters seeking to save him from emotional abuse and financial ruin, against a vivid and poetic portrait of 20th-century Ukrainian life (not just tractors).
Tanika Gupta’s dramatisation honours the richness of the novel but fails to balance its conflicting tones. The shifts between gentle comedy, brutal testimony and sex farce are far more abrupt and crude on the stage than filtered through the reader’s imagination.
Mark Babych’s production evokes a strong sense of place. The use of suitcases as both symbols of exile and comic devices is inspired. Geoffrey Beevers and Ruth Lass lead a versatile ensemble in which Polly Frame and Hilary Tones stand out.
DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE
Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford (Tickets: 01789 403493/ rsc.org.uk; £5-40)
A SHORT HISTORY OF TRACTORS IN UKRAINIAN
Hull Truck Theatre Company, Hull (Tickets: 01482 323638; £12- 22.50)