'Dido' puts in a rare appearance

CAMBRIDGE -- Christopher Marlowe wrote ''Dido, Queen of Carthage," his ferociously brilliant blank-verse tragedy of Dido and Aeneas, in 1585. Yet because it's almost never staged in this country, says the English director Neil Bartlett, it seems like a brand-new play.

''Even at Harvard, very few people are going to know what happens next in this play," says Bartlett, whose production of ''Dido" opens tomorrow at the American Repertory Theatre and runs through March 26. ''It's not like 'Antigone' or 'Phedre,' where people are going, 'I wonder how they'll do it this time.' "

And it's not just the audience that is encountering what feels like a new work. ART alumna Diane D'Aquila, who plays Dido, talks about how different this role feels from the Shakespearean ones she performs regularly, notably at Canada's Stratford Festival.

''When I do Shakespeare," D'Aquila says, ''especially when I'm up at the festival, the ghosts or spirits of the actors who've done those roles before you are thick within the walls of those theaters." As Cleopatra, for example, ''Look who I had ahead of me: Zoe Caldwell, Goldie Semple, Maggie Smith. I've had some big boots to fill," she says. ''With Dido, it's as if it were a new play -- but it's a play that's in a period that I know."

For Bartlett, ''Dido" is a play he has loved since he first read it at 13 or 14, in a dusty secondhand bookshop in the small town where he grew up. So when the ART approached him and asked what he'd like to stage, ''Dido" came immediately to mind.

''I want people to meet this wonderful man," Bartlett says of Marlowe. ''My work is very personal, so the stories that I tell and the writers I collaborate with matter to me hugely."

And, indeed, as he speaks, it feels as if Marlowe comes alive in the room, the unseen collaborator in what Bartlett calls ''this strange and wonderful beast," the tragic story of a proud Carthaginian queen and the warrior who abandons her to found Rome.

''It's a real paradox -- so powerful emotionally and so demanding technically. And the man was 21," Bartlett says. ''He was 21. How did he write poetry like this? . . . He wrote it with such freedom and such force. He's such an extraordinary creature. And he was dead at 29."

What the collaborators share, Bartlett says, is ''the idea that theater should be gorgeous, extraordinary, passionate. I'm not making this up. That's Marlowe."

It's also Bartlett. His work as artistic director of London's Lyric Hammersmith from 1994 to 2004 established his reputation as a brilliantly inventive artist, one whose rich and passionate stagings bring little-known classics freshly to life. And ''Dido," clearly, is a classic that is fully alive to him.

''I love how beautiful it is," he says. ''Wanting to create an evening where just how gorgeous something is matters in its own right -- that's important to me, too. And then there are the heart-stopping moments, where someone says, 'I love you,' and nothing else matters."

Dido does say that to Aeneas, and he -- for a time -- to her. But Marlowe shows their relationship as one toyed with by the gods, particularly Cupid. And this isn't the ''silly little figure for a shop window on Valentine's Day" that our culture has reduced him to, Bartlett says; this is the darkly powerful child of Venus.

''Cupid is a slightly dangerous and unpredictable creature," Bartlett says, ''and you don't quite know what he's going to do next." So the director made an unpredictable choice in casting the role: John Kelly, the New York performance artist, singer, dancer, and drag queen.

''John brings a particular kind of slightly alarming -- no, it's very alarming -- glee to the proceedings," Bartlett says. ''It's great working with him. To find an actor who can move like he can, hold an audience like he can, and then to find he has a lovely countertenor voice for these Elizabethan ballads -- it's just a gift."

The original ''Dido" had two songs, but they have not survived, so Bartlett and his music director, Laura Jeppesen, have set two texts -- one by Marlowe, the other from Ovid -- to music. ''They wrote these two beautiful arias for me," Kelly says, ''and I'm singing like an altar boy again."

He's relishing the role of Cupid. ''I get to breeze through this in a very profound and weighty manner -- I have a lot of running around in my little loincloth," Kelly says. ''He's everything -- he's light, he's dark, he's male, he's female, he's not just a pudgy putto. He's meant to be scary and strange at times. That's my job: to kind of render that in the right doses of cruelty and beguilement."

If that sounds a little dark, it fits Bartlett's vision. ''Dido's last line -- she speaks it in Virgil's Latin -- is 'I rejoice to go into the dark places,' " the director says. ''I think that's Marlowe speaking."

The darkness is part of what distinguishes Marlowe from that other great Elizabethan. ''Shakespeare you have a lifelong relationship with; perhaps Marlowe is somebody you want to have a wild affair with," Bartlett says. ''And whatever your relationship with Shakespeare, in the end you love him for his compassion. With Marlowe, you love him for his passion."

Sometimes, Bartlett says, it's a passion of fierce simplicity. ''I think there's a kind of ferocity in Marlowe, in the middle of his characters," he says. ''For all their eloquence, that extraordinary language that just pours out of them, at the center there's this simplicity. 'With this my hand I give to you my heart.' It's the simplest possible line in the play. It couldn't be simpler."

But it's not always simple, Bartlett adds. Consider Anna, Dido's sister, who's hopelessly in love with Dido's rejected suitor, Iarbus.

''Anna says, 'I will strew thy walks with my disheveled hair.' Anyone who's ever loved someone who doesn't love them back knows exactly what she means," Bartlett says, ''but we would never say it that way. It gives shape to something that we can't give shape to. That's why we need Marlowe. There's a kind of rawness in Marlowe."

In keeping with that rawness, Bartlett and his longtime collaborator, the scenic and costume designer Rae Smith, have created a bare, stripped-down set in the ART's Loeb Drama Center. ''She's turned the interior of the ART into a great blackened shell of a building -- burned black brickwork, everything stripped and exposed," Bartlett says. ''And then in that world it's the actors' job to create the worlds of the play."

As he explains it, ''Dido" has three worlds: the military milieu of Aeneas, which Bartlett is portraying as ''very much the current military world"; Dido's society, ''which is a world of civilization and luxury, a world of women"; and the realm of the gods.

''The immortals seem to have arrived onstage by way of some kind of '50s burlesque dress-up box," Bartlett says. ''It's as if they've just acquired these human bodies for the evening, and you have this sense of 'How strange to have a body.' And they look gorgeous. The young ones show lots of flesh, and the older ones get drag to die for. They're all gold; they're like gilded statues come to life. Very strange. Very strange."

Which, he declares, is just what a play should be. ''You don't go to the theater for the familiar," Bartlett says. ''You go to see the world made strange."

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.