Frances Moore and Alex Taylor's daringly dished up Dido and Aeneas: Recomposed has come into town from the west with its original gusto intact.
Last year, the first production travelled around the cool galleries of the new Te Uru Waitakere; on Tuesday night we explored the darker spaces of the Basement Theatre.
"Love's a bitch" is the tagline on press releases, but it might also have been "Revenge is a riot", as a legendary love affair is sabotaged by a gaggle of shrieking witches, memorably led by Taylor, in dominatrix drag. Zapping a 17th century Purcell opera into 2016, Moore incites her cast to investigate every possibility of stage business in a most entertaining theatrical divertissement. From the physical intimacy of the lovelorn Dido and her handmaidens to the malign witches, whom we meet in the foyer with a malevolent Sorceress towering over the bar, this was gripping stuff.
Purcell's Grove scene, set upstairs in the studio theatre, mixed bowers of flowers, furious storms and the wayward evil sisters, with strains of House of the Rising Sun and Stravinsky's Rite running through the music.
Amy Jansen was a moving and very human Dido, with Tamsyn Matchett a nimbly solicitous Belinda and Barbara Paterson ably completing the trio. Rhys Hingston again met the challenge of playing the noble Aeneas as well as dispensing randy mischief.
