Keeping an eye on the children. 
      On taking your place in the Globe for Dido, Queen of Carthage you are confronted with an aberration. The carefully reconstructed Renaissance theatre has had a long slide, climbing frame and children's swing bolted on to it. This is difficult to take in at first. The eye struggles to reconcile the broad stage, gilded balconies and mock marble columns with the intense steel architecture which converts the space into a playground. 
      The story, for those not familiar with Virgil's Aeneid, finds Trojan hero Aeneas fleeing the destroyed Troy with his followers, and coming to Carthage where queen Dido is made to fall in love with him, to help speed him on his way to Italy. He is eventually ordered to leave her to follow his destiny of founding a new Troy, whereupon he casts her off with tragic consequences. 
      The production itself proves to be just as bold as the set promises, taking the idea of the mythic gods as children to the extreme. Jupiter and Hermes both wear huge oversized jumpers and have childish mannerisms, while Venus swathes herself in a yellow feather boa and chiffon robe that flaps behind her as she skitters off stage in her heels, while Juno lifts an arched eyebrow over her gold lame bag. So gods are boys, goddesses cocktail party rivals and mortals their playthings, made miserable by their independent emotional lives. All of this is performed flamboyantly though it takes a while for the production to hit its stride. Once there, however, it begins to diminish the problem of the set and forthright interpretation. It has the sense of a complex and heavy machine which grinds into life and gathers momentum. 
      Originally Dido was written for a company of child actors, perhaps Marlowe felt they would best represent a world run according to capricious whims spurred on by petty spite, elemental anger and love. Tim Caroll, the Master of the Play, has extrapolated this and writ it large on the stage - all the props are children's toys (including Aeneas' son) and Dido's funeral pyre is signified with sparklers. He interweaves simple music with melodrama in its original theatrical sense where music is equal to the current emotion on stage. This is a useful adjunct when following Marlowe's verse. 
     At the centre of the play is the notion of love as tyranny: from Venus' love for her son Aeneas to Dido's subjection to love by Cupid, to Aeneas' love born of relief from the trauma of the sacking of Troy. Will Keen evokes this with a long monologue that cuts across the grain of the play with its bloody descriptions of slaughter and physical suffering. The challenge of drawing out the substance of the play, its power relationships and sense of love as an undeniable compulsion, is formidable. The production rises to it, and the cast is uniformly good, but when there is so much competing for your attention that doesn't naturally fit with the Globe's form, and the playground theme from which there was no deviation - can we believe there is a real human tragedy here?
Ciaran Jennings