Ariadne/Dido and Aeneas review – English Touring Opera conjures two strikingly different mythological worlds

Hackney Empire, London Jessica Cale’s soprano is diamond-bright in Elena Langer and Glyn Maxwell’s captivating monologue, while Rebecca Meltzer creates a compelling schoolyard staging of Purcell English Touring Opera’s autumn season has a mythological theme – which, in practice, means operas about women getting left behind.

Touring alongside Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice is this compact double bill, pairing Dido and Aeneas with Elena Langer ’s Ariadne, a 20-minute scene for soprano setting words by Glyn Maxwell, which was premiered by Almeida Opera in 2002.

Langer’s mini-opera is essentially a monologue, sung persuasively here by Jessica Cale, her powerful soprano diamond-bright.

Anna Morrissey’s production, though, has six people on stage: abandonment feels like something active as well as passive.

It begins with Theseus leaving, disentangling himself from both the sleeping Ariadne and the red thread that links them, spooling from a heap on the floor – it’s as if he got back from the labyrinth the night before.

When Ariadne wakes he’s still there, pacing in the shadows or turning her bed on its rotating platform.

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