After Dido

Film and theatre piece with live performance of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas
English National Opera at the Young Vic 15-25 Apr
£30

With Susan Bickley, Katherine Manley, James Gower et al
Christian Curnyn (conductor)

Director Katie Mitchell

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Compared to Wagner, Dido and Aeneas is mobile-phone-size: a room-shaped, pocket-length masterpiece of Purcell baroque opera, famous for its heart-wrenching final aria. The lovelorn Dido, dying of grief, sings 'When I am laid in earth', one of music's stateliest and most moving suicide notes. (If you're queueing to get in the Purcell Rooms on the South Bank, you'll see its first notes engraved in the wall.)

And there's a lot of it about at the moment. The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden have just done a very good Dido and Aeneas (coupled with a less successful Handel Acis and Galatea) with an excellent performance from Sarah Connolly.

This brilliant multimedia modern take on Dido, however, is something different. And special It comes from ENO at the Young Vic, and is by Katie Mitchell, a director who hasn't always endeared herself to opera traditionalists (Glyndebourne recently gave her raised eyebrows and lowered thumbs). But this must surely grip and move anyone.

It's not an easy stagework to describe. 'Live-action movie with live music' gets close. What you see when you enter the Young Vic's trendy, informal but almost intimate space is puzzling at first: a huge video screen at the top; underneath, three sets - bedroom, kitchen, living space - in which dozens of black-clothed people are bustling around with cameras.

Then it starts, and you realise what's going on. It's a film about three lonely people coping with lost love, each in their own flat, all listening to the same Radio 3 broadcast. The film you see above is live video of  what's being enacted below, complete with cutaways and closeups, exterior shots, even flashbacks to seaside and meadows. Frequently you see the characters glimpse at clocks - which, of course, are showing real time. It's an effective dramatic frisson. Occasionally (but only occasionally) there's spoken poetry, most of which wasn't all that clear over the mikes.

After ten minutes of introductory 'footage' the music begins - a performance of Dido live before you being 'listened to over the radio' by the characters. Of course you guess that one of the three characters will commit suicide: but which? The man whose marriage is evidently as on the rocks as his solo drinking, reliving past love through his slides and memories? The woman whose husband's ghost reappears to caress and dance with her in her kitchen dreams? Or the bedsit girl whose empty life seems destined to end in an overdose of the prescription drugs she holds in front of her? The end is harrowing, but - in a neat and thoroughly unmawkish touch - there is resolve and hope for one of the other characters too.

The acting performances are sound and convincing, as is the music-making (particularly from the instrumental players, with their beautifully watercolour sounds that complement the teary drizzle in the 'live action'). Susan Bickley's Dido is the pick of the singers, her final lament made more powerful by the intimacy afforded by the microphone.

But the winner is the astonishing production - in all 75 minutes there wasn't a single duff shot, continuity error or intrusive stagehand in the 'film'. It works fabulously.

This is something really special and unusual and you're strongly recommended to go and see it. Kate Mitchell has created something powerful for our time - a modern urban interpretation of the loneliness that did for Dido that mixes trad and moble-phone-era technology smartly. But more than that, it works on many levels: the film above being created in the live action below, the opera being created by the musicians in front of us, the characters listening to and living the opera as we see it being made. Brilliant. Extraordinary. Go.