Tragic holiday fling

There is a remarkable sense of discovery about the Globe's revival of Christopher Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage, which has had no professional performances in Britain for centuries.

Perhaps this fascinating drama has been ignored in the belief that it was just a literal version of Virgil's Aeneid, though 60 per cent of the text proves to be original Marlowe. But it is the playwright's poetry and dramatic flair that thrills.

Tim Carroll's spectacularly dreadful production stifles Dido's glory and reduces it to a thumping, clumping theatre-game. The divine enchantment of Claire van Kempen's music is the one redeeming feature.

Much of the play's characteristic tension derives from abrupt oscillations between an impersonal, grand speech style and an intimate, dramatic one. Marlowe's amazing poetry captures a sense of the brutalities of the Greco-Trojan war in which Aeneas fought.

It vividly conveys the erotic passion the warrior awakens in himself and Dido when he sails into her life and furtively out again: Aeneas's interesting battle between love and duty is complicated by the interfering Gods and resolved by his reluctant agreement to do the decent, selfless thing.

Carroll, noting Dido was written for one of the children's companies, stages the play in a 1960s children's playground, complete with hula hoops, toy daggers for Trojan warriors, a swing and huge slide, down which Hermes slithers in giant boots. Ascanius.

Aeneas's son is represented by a large doll for whom James Garnon, as if a ventriloquist, supplies a boy's shrill voice. This jokey immersion in childish things typifies a production which trivialises and burlesques Marlowe's seriousness. Carroll even tries to justify his decision to have the Gods played as unruly children by suggesting the device enables us to distinguish the divine from the mortal. In unfairly bad taste, Dido's suicide by self-immolation is played while sparklers are lit and burned.

This coarse, reductive approach does not, however, justify the awful, inappropriate acting. Will Keen, dressed in jeans and T-shirt plays the shattered, conflicted, sexually enthralled hero, Aeneas, as a laid-back, bored holiday-maker nonchalantly romancing a Queen. He describes Troy's ruin in the tones of a borough councillor complaining about excess litter. Rakie Ayola's handsome, not always intelligible Dido has more the air of a woman enjoying a holiday romance than of one by love possessed. Ghastly.

Until 18 August. Box office: 020 7401 9919.

Dido, Queen Of Carthage