Human suffering pulls focus from gods and great destinies in Katie Mitchell’s ENO/Young Vic co-production of this tempestuous tale of passion and grief — the third major staging of the story of Dido and Aeneas in the year of Henry Purcell’s 350th birthday. With intelligence and ingenuity, Mitchell, aided by Leo Warner, the director of photography, brings us a many-layered interpretation of Purcell’s opera in what has become the team’s hallmark multimedia style. The results are visually lovely yet fiercely compelling: an interweaving of disparate lives and individual fates, and an acknowledgement of music’s power to heal and to ignite a frightening blaze of feeling.

The stage is littered with props and cameras and criss-crossed by snaking cables, all of which permits the simultaneous enacting and live filming of the narrative. To the side sits the seven-piece musical ensemble, playing with elegance and exuberance under Christian Curnyn, who conducts from the harpsichord. The singers, who perform Purcell’s score in its entirety, mingle with four actors who in Mitchell’s vision are a quartet of Londoners listening to a radio broadcast of the opera in their homes. Everything is exposed: we see sound effects produced, and watch as camera-wielding performers scurry about. In tandem, a huge screen offers the lens-eye view: an extreme close-up of a tear-stained face, a hand trembling with indecision, feet retracing half-forgotten dance steps across a kitchen floor.

The dislocation has a delicious wit, and far from diffusing the piece’s emotional intensity, fragmentation intensifies it. Alongside Purcell’s operatic account of Dido’s monumental suffering, sung exquisitely by a cast led by Susan Bickley as Dido, tales of everyday agony emerge. A woman (Sandy McDade) slips on her dead husband’s old shoes; another (Helena Lymbery), facing the disintegration of her marriage to a tormented Dominic Rowan, slumps hopelessly on to a sofa. In a grim bedsit, a despairing young girl (Amanda Hale) prepares a sad feast for one — a collection of delicacies that she cannot swallow — before ritualistically lining up pills in preparation for suicide.

Visual echoes reverberate from one life to another: roses, love letters, and that supposed symbol of eternity, the wedding ring. Those connections, and the actors’ onstage proximity, point up the paradox of isolation in the overcrowded metropolis; headlights stripe the windows, and street sounds occasionally intrude on the music. The opera sometimes illustrates the action, and sometimes supplies a counterpoint: Purcell’s cackling witches make cruel mockery of the pain portrayed; the beautiful Dido’s Lament is rendered still more heartbreaking by the images on stage and screen.

That is Mitchell’s great achievement: a work in which there is a genuine, and dramatically thrilling, dialogue not just between media, but between art forms. Gorgeous.

- Box office: 020-7922 2922, to April 25

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