Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, the tragic opera of love and betrayal, was given its first known performance in 1689 in the unlikely location of Josias Priest’s School for Young Ladies in Chelsea, West London. Little detail remains of the night, but we can be fairly sure that it didn’t involve puppets.

That, however, is no barrier to the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, which is mounting its own version of Purcell’s work, starring nine 3ft-tall marionettes.

“It’s the exact opposite of being wooden,” contends the director Tim Carroll, who was converted to the use of puppets initially as a practical solution for the creation of the giant in his 2002 Kent Opera staging of Handel’s Acis and Galatea.

“If I see an actor portraying an emotion, I often start to wonder if it’s real. If I see a puppet portraying an emotion, then I know immediately that it’s me, the audience, that has created that emotion. Puppets key into the imagination.”

Based on Virgil’s Aeneid, Purcell’s opera recounts the doomed love affair between the shipwrecked Aeneas and the Queen he later abandons, resulting in her suicide and Purcell’s most famous aria, Dido’s Lament. OAE’s version intertwines the opera with Christopher Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage (published in 1594). “It’s like hearing the same story told from two angles,” Carroll says. “In the Purcell, Aeneas is tricked by an evil sorceress into leaving Dido. In Marlowe, he’s fickle and faithless.”

The production is reminiscent of the early 17th-century masque tradition from which Purcell’s Dido grew, splitting up the operatic presentation with dance and entertainments, but it also creates practical difficulties. Carroll says: “We needed either singers who could read Marlowe like actors, or actors who could sing operatically. We ended up with both [a singer and an actor] expressing themselves through one puppet.”

But achieving that expression is a different matter, as I find out in the Jerwood rehearsal space in Black-friars in Central London, surrounded by 18 glassy eyes gazing lifelessly into the void.

The dolls, created by Mandarava, the puppet-maker, are inspired by extravagant early 17th-century courtly masque designs: the Sorceress a ghastly worm with the body of a vacuum-cleaner tube; Dido far from demure in an open-breasted gold dress. Aeneas slumps oafishly in bling chain mail.

I watch as Giles Underwood, Aeneas’s baritone singing voice (left hand, lower back), and the actor John Oliver (right hand, head) jointly attempt to walk their Aeneas over to Dido, as she reveals her love. There is a flurry of limbs and Aeneas hovers in a ghostly manner, a bit like a Dalek.

“Some people take to it very naturally, others don’t,” Mandarava says. “Two people working together on one puppet, before you even think about singing, is tricky.”

“It is a bit experimental at this stage,” Underwood admits, pointing out that it’s only the second day of rehearsals. “The aim is to try to make it look as little like Team America as possible.”

Even given the constraints, there are things, Underwood says, that his wooden colleagues have taught him: “Stillness, principally. The great thing about presenting an opera with puppets is that it’s not about grandstanding over an orchestra. You have to nurture that feeling of inviting the audience in to you - ‘bring your ears closer to the stage and listen to what I have to say’.” Just whatever you do, don’t look into their eyes.

— Dido and Aeneas is at the Wiltshire Music Centre, Bradford-upon-Avon, on Oct 12 (01225 860100), and QEH, Southbank, on Oct 13, 14 (0871 6632597)

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