A shot of cold water

Having performed Noël Coward's Still Life in Aldwych Tube station, Angels in the Architecture, which, interestingly, specialises in matching plays to unusual spaces, now takes a heavenly, or at least ecclesiastical, step upwards.

Christopher Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage was scandalously neglected until Shakespeare's Globe fielded an unsatisfactory, idiosyncratic production in 2003.

Yet what particular justification is there for mounting in a chapel refuge for homeless women this Marlovian drama of the doomed love of Carthage's Queen for Trojan Aeneas?

The gods, who take an interfering hand in the love affair, are, after all, more human than divine, being petulant, juvenile intriguers, and Marlowe's grand, spectacular setting does not suit Rebecca McCutcheon's restless production, which keeps us moving on a theatrical promenade through the chapel, its outlying rooms and courtyard.

Such objections would be rated pedantic and irrelevant had Miss McCutcheon's production discovered a theatrical style and tone for a drama that veers between impassioned erotic feeling, atheistic flippancy and satire.

The storm whisking Aeneas and Dido into a cave sounds real, but to see stage-hands with watering cans on a high fire escape smacks of poor, silly theatre.

So, too, does the behaviour of modern-dress gods. Juno, who sports a roguish red-feather in her headgear, throws water over Richard Nutter's camp, over-age Ganymede as he unenthusiastically nuzzles Jupiter in the church.

The prime trouble, though, is Sarah Thom's Dido, whose staid, schoolmistressish manners, whether butchly got up in jodhpurs for hunting or yearning for a younger Aeneas in Marlowe's matchless, ecstastic verse, purges her character of eros with brisk efficiency.

Jake Maskall's handsome Aeneas, harrowed and harrowing, alone realises that Marlowe sometimes expresses himself in poetry that even surpasses Shakespeare's.

Dido - Queen Of Carthage