Word: dido
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...South African fiction. What about future vintages? Next year will see new novels by Mark Behr, Patricia Schonstein and other young whites who have made their mark since apartheid's fall. Expect more from Damon Galgut and Pamela Jooste, as well as nonwhite stars like Achmat Dangor, E.K.M. Dido, Niq Mhlongo, Mongane Wally Serote, Miriam Tlali, Zoe Wicomb and countless more. Now that all citizens can, in theory, get the education once reserved for whites, a new, thoroughly African generation could rise to replace the white liberal warhorses of the struggle years. (Gordimer turns 82 this month, Fugard...
...fires frame Dido, Queen of Carthage: the burning of sacked Troy and Dido’s funeral pyre. Ray Smith’s highly stylized design hides both from view, though periodically between scenes we hear the haunting crackle of unseen flames. Smith’s concept of invisible flames works as theatrical genius, making fire itself one of the many ghosts in hot pursuit of Aeneas and the Trojans. It also allows room for the internal but equally violent blazes of the half-maddened mortals to burn all the more horribly onstage...
Lest the audience seek any respite in the comfort of the everyday world, the setting of Dido, Queen of Carthage looks and feels as dark and cold as outer space. When in one scene Dido, Aeneas, and their courtiers go hunting, the sudden appearance of staged “daylight” is beautifully painful, revealing vulnerable men and women so damaged by reality that they seem more at home in the gold-and-black no-place of the remaining scenes...
...cast lacks in the way of scenery and props, they compensate with expressive stage movements that give the play the violent elegance of a bullfight. Even without taking a step, characters’ postures speak volumes: Aeneas (Colin Lane) looks every inch the shell-shocked military man, while Dido (Diane D’Aquila) transforms from self-possessed stateswoman to wounded animal...
...once infernal and frozen, violent and funereal, Dido, Queen of Carthage is as fantastic as it is eerie. Audiences leave the theatre feeling slightly voyeuristic, having been privy to the raw and tortured ids of the desperate characters. Dido turns viewers into armchair pyromaniacs, riveted to the literal and psychological fires that consume the stage for an unrelenting two hours. We leave the blackened stage much as Aeneas must have left the charred ruins of Troy: tortured and haunted, with a taste of ashes in our mouths...