Theatre review: Dido & The Belindas a safe party for the abandoned

Dido & The Belindas  

T:>Works
72-13 Mohamed Sultan Road
July 18, 9pm

Part of the fun of this is in the late-night, underground ambience, the audience dragging their chairs round little cocktail tables, bottles of drinks already flowing.

In a theatre scene more familiar with the cushy theatres of the Esplanade or Wild Rice, here is immediately a sense of possibility.

Then Singapore drag queen Becca D’Bus strides onto the runway stage, plumped up with heaps of garment and wearing as her crown a tin foil-lined helmet of antenna, belting aria: “Ah! Belinda, I am press’d... Peace and I are strangers grown.”

The lament from Henry Purcell’s 1689 opera Dido And Aeneas is mournfully sung by American lyric tenor Thomas Michael Allen, equally heavily made-up and sat amid the audience in a high chair.

D’Bus mouths the words in sync, gesticulating mockingly, sometimes impatient.

The clash of aesthetics is at once brazen but also familiar to drag culture, where model poses in the photo shoots of vogue and the boldest fashion pieces have always been appropriated to glamorise and empower.

Here it is, attracting a theatre crowd, set to the twangs of the harpsichord played by Japanese musician Toru Yamanaka.

Dido & The Belindas is the theatre part of theatre company T:>Works’ celebration of its 40th anniversary. Under the DnA Fest umbrella, it is a third of a trilogy that also includes a film and an afterparty, which people can experience together or in parts.

Each is an inflection on the classic story of spurned love and duty, originally told in Virgil’s Aeneid, but wrenched in radical directions by artistic director Ong Keng Sen.

So Dido & The Belindas becomes set to the key of abandonment and societal ostracisation, in a kind of whiplash roulette that both truncates the opera and expands its relevance.

Greek hero Aeneas is an afterthought, cast as an easily turned-on chandelier. Dido’s closest companion Belinda becomes a tribe of misfits – including a confessional intersex character – though the show really tries to centre itself on the real-life story of a Singaporean wheelchair user going by the pseudonym of V4LCY, paralysed from the waist down after a suicide attempt in 2018 when she was 16.

The heft of the show brings the fantastical fun of the opera back down to earth. Carthage queen Dido D’Bus signposts: “This is here. This is now.”

She becomes facilitator to a live video call with V4LCY, during which the now para-athlete reads her poems and rehashes an interview she did with local media channel Our Grandfather Story.

Of course, like Dido, she once chose to die rather than suffer a lack of love, an act rehabilitated to become a brave one here, reaffirming the fundamental right to hugs and care.

This reviewer is reminded of British author Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2020), in which the novelist writes: “Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.” This can be seen as a painful rejoinder.

And of course, more meta-textually, there is a reordering of priorities from the original, which centres on Aeneas’ higher duty of founding the city of Lavinium, his descendants later founding Rome – that city of riches, violence, slavery and eventual imperialism. In Dido And Aeneas is also an alternative path for the modern world: What if Aeneas, instead of leaving, had stayed to nurse his tendresse?

The ceding of this space to V4LCY is telling of director Ong’s priorities, given that it inevitably takes the spirited momentum of the show down a notch.

The attempt to kick-start it again after this is a difficult transition for audiences, which is a shame, with the next florid, durian-filled funeral offering some of the best tableaus and cathartic weeping.

But the point of Dido & The Belindas is really not in acting or conventional theatre. Through the rough sketches of a known story, it builds solidarities, between theatre and drag culture, between queerness and other axes of exclusion.

In the Arcimboldo-esque fruit and gimp mask showpiece costumes designed by D’Bus and Khairullah Rahim, the final hurrah of 1998 gay anthem Believe by American singer Cher, and the pushing of the singular Belinda to the plural, it manages to create the safest of spaces.

And is that not the point of theatre, which has allowed generations of those who have felt a tiny bit left out of the mainstream to discover confidence in who they are?

Book It/Dido & The Belindas

Where: 72-13 Mohamed Sultan Road
When: July 23, 7.30pm; July 25 and 26, 9pm
Admission: $40
Info: 

tworksasia.org