STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
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Sykes and Co turn Marlowe into a theatrical gem
Gordon Parsons reviews Dido, Queen of Carthage, at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon
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PETER MASON tunes his ear into the domestic affairs of a Carribbean couple with a troublesome son
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.
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GORDON PARSONS meditates on the appetite of contemporary audiences for the obscene cruelty of Shakespeare’s Roman nightmare
GORDON PARSONS admires a version of Marlowe’s grim tragedy that strips it down to its gay essentials