Ah! Forget My Fate Part II consists of an ambitious three-woman staging of Purcell’s most famous opera, Dido and Aeneas. A courtly drama with a twist, the production asks: how can the most powerful woman in Carthage survive when her worst enemies lie within?

It’s been a little while since we heard from Better Strangers Feminist Opera Collective. Back in November last year, our Sarah C interviewed them about their show – the first part of their Ah! Forget My Fate! project. Hodge and I went to the show – “part-opera, part-cabaret abridged history of women in opera” – and I’d definitely recommend them.

This week – on Thursday 26 July at 10pm – they’re back at the King’s Head in Islington, North London. They sent us this Q&A press release about the show – Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas – and their work.

Why would a feminist opera company put on Dido and Aeneas?

“Because in many ways, Dido and Aeneas is where it all started. Whether or not Dido and Aeneas is the first opera in Western classical tradition is up for (interminable and pedantic) debate, but it’s certainly one of the earliest that’s regularly performed – particularly here in the UK where we’re based. And Dido is the first in a noble tradition of heroines who die an arguably completely pointless death (in the context of the opera as a self-contained work, anyway), so to me it makes sense for us to begin at the beginning.

“It was also written, we think, to be performed by a girls’ school, which makes it well suited for modern adaptations with exclusively female voices.

“A personal motivation for me is that Dido is a really interesting feminist figurehead. As a ruler, she refused to submit to any kind of conquest (sexual, emotional or literal) from the men around her, and she earned the respect of her people through an ironclad adherence to an ideal.”

What will audiences take away from BSFOC’s telling of the story? Why does it need to be (re)told?

“As a producer/director, the main question I want to ask of the work is why Dido dies. That’s what’s ultimately led me personally to the staging we’re about to present here. I don’t believe that people die of a broken heart, unless they have some kind of congenital heart defect, and I don’t believe that the queen of Carthage has the kind of emotional pallor that lends itself to dying of a hissy fit after the bloke you’ve known for a couple of days decides it’s time to move on. I want there to be a driving force behind it. I want to know what it is about the witches that gives them such power over Dido.

“People who aren’t familiar with classical mythology, and the Aeneid in particular, aren’t all that likely to know much about Dido, and you’re certainly not going to learn anything about her from the text of Purcell’s opera. Our telling of the story – the recasting of the witches as the shadow selves of the named characters – is intended to help to fill in the blanks. Nahum Tate (librettist)’s Dido is not controlling, masochistic, or even particularly bold, and that is why Dido’s shadow self – and, by extension, the witches – have so much power. The impulse is there, and is all the more irresistible for going unrecognised.

“I want to retell Dido and Aeneas because I love Dido and I can’t stand Aeneas. If you take Tate’s text by itself, she’s nothing but a puppet at his mercy, and I don’t want that for her. I want her to have agency, even if it’s an agency that no-one can quite understand. And I want him to look like a tool, because he is.”

Imagine I know nothing about opera and classical literature. What background knowledge do I need to acquire to appreciate what you’re doing with this production? Is it reasonable to assume the audiences won’t know much either? How will you help them into the opera?

“Basically, I would like to transmit the idea that Dido’s story runs deeper than the text of the opera implies. I think we’re helping the audience along there with the addition of newspapers, which help to flesh out what might be going on beyond the confines of Dido’s palace and what kind of impact her dalliances might be having outside. In the mythology, Dido is a really great ruler who is essentially completely derailed by Aeneas’ arrival on the scene. I want the audience to get a sense of that.

“I also want to transmit the idea that Dido’s death, to me, seems impossible without the impulse towards self-destruction.

“I think – or, at least, I hope – that this production will be reasonably accessible to people who have neither a classical music nor classical historical background, and I’d be interested to hear what needs to be drawn out of the narrative and the staging to make it so.”

You want to take your production to schools/colleges. What do you hope to teach young people about? Opera? Feminism? Purcell’s era? Classical lit? Tropes?

“A variety of things. I’d like to teach everyone in a school – meaning also the staff – how you can adapt a work like Dido and Aeneas to be performable by small forces, because I think that’s one of our major achievements with it. I want to teach performers how to be creative with limited resources, and to encourage them to think about alternative readings.

“I want to teach people to sing, and not to be afraid of singing. That would be a unifying motivation in any educational work I do with Better Strangers.

“Back when I was doing GCSEs, Dido’s Lament came up as a regularly used example of how melody + basso continuo worked, so I think it could be a great set of lessons to people aged 13+ of how Purcell’s music was constructed and how his melodies, instrumentation and word-setting were put together. I think it would be more fun and probably more instructive for people to do this/see it done in performance.

“And, yes, I’d like to use it as an opportunity to teach story-makers of the future that they might want to think about why, precisely, they want to kill off their lead [insert kyriarchal minority here] character rather than resolve the plot some other way.”

• Ah, Forget My Fate Part II: Dido and Aeneas at the King’s Head Theatre, 26 July 2012. Book tickets here. Read more about the show’s development on the BSFOC blog.

TEA

Make tea, child, said my kind mamma. Sit by me, love, and make tea.

Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1747)

Ah, the Joke Post comes upon us at last. T is for ‘t’… very droll. I lift a cup to that. But fie! Have we learned nothing on this lexical journey? First and foremost, tea was not always pronounced as we currently say it: when it first appeared in English in 1601 it was ‘taaaaay‘ and often written tay (like the modern French thé, a bit). It is not quite clear when and why the shift to ‘ti’ happened, but, then, few things are as easy to lose sight of as pronunciation (how many people remember that Keats was a Cockney?)

Shall I be mother? Catherine of Braganza, painted by Jacob Huysmans.

Tea, of course, has the additional complication that it is not an English word (although what is?) – it came from the Dutch thee, in turn from Malay and, eventually, Chinese Amoy dialect: t’e, or the Mandarin ch’a. Woven into the geographical etymology, then, is a legacy of import history: around the mid-seventeenth century we procured our tea from the Dutch, who imported it from Malaysia and, ultimately, China. What exactly were they importing? Why, tea‘s first definition, of course: ‘the leaves of the tea-plant, usually in a dried and prepared state for making the drink’. In this form, tea began with a queen, and quickly became every eighteenth-century Cosmo girl’s first route of seduction.

Brew and Thunder.

But first – the drink. ‘Made by infusing these leaves in boiling water, having a somewhat bitter and aromatic flavour, and acting as a moderate stimulant’ – in this sense, the word tea is first recorded around 1601, so some trendsetters must have been aware of it before the widespread importing of the later seventeenth century, when tea really came into its own: Samuel Pepys tried it in 1660, and a couple of years later it found a celebrity backer in the be-farthingaled shape of the Portuguese queen consort to Charles II, Catherine of Braganza (remember her?). So, in England at least, tea was from the beginning tending towards the female of the species.

Catherine’s tea-drinking was partly to do with Portugal’s colonial links with Asia, but also with her temperament: solemn and pious, she initially had trouble fitting into the Protestant English court and her preference for a ‘moderate stimulant’ over the ales and beers otherwise drunk marked one of many departures. But tea was quickly owning its stimulating qualities and being marketed as a ‘tonic’, a civilized alternative to alcohol capable of soothing aches’n’pains and spurring on mental capacities: a zeitgeist for the intellectual impetus of the early Enlightenment – as against Charles II’s well-known debauchery – and, in fact, a ‘panacea‘:

Hail, Queen of Plants, Pride of Elysian Bow’rs!
How shall we speak thy complicated Powr’s?
Thou wondrous Panacea, to asswage
The Calentures of Youth’s fermenting rage,
And animate the freezing veins of age.

Nahum Tate, from Panacea: A Poem Upon Tea (1700)

But what started out as a Portuguese import became a matter of English national identity, and by the next century London’s East India Company had established a monopoly on trade, controlling imports into Britain (and thus, prices), using its extensive trade links with Queen Catherine’s dowry –then-Bombay – and the East Indies, and Asia. It was thus that the English turned not into a nation of coffee drinkers, but to devotees of the ‘Queen of Plants’. And a queen she certainly was, and not entirely distinct from the maternal and oft-secluded Queen Anne, who dramatically reduced the size of the English court and inspired a new fashion for calm domesticity and politeness. Thus, the bustling male-dominated coffee-houses, but also a more feminine fix at home…

Five Leaves Left.

So in 1738 tea came to mean not just some withered leaf, but also an opportunity for socialising! Hurrah! To be precise, tea became ‘a meal or social entertainment at which tea is served; especially an ordinary afternoon or evening meal, at which the usual beverage is tea’. The fact that it could connote an ‘ordinary afternoon meal’ made tea a convenient beverage to offer casual social callers, although it was also, of course, a beverage that demanded a whole host of conspicuous purchases: a full tea-set and the crucial Other Element – sugar. Thus your tea-table represented Britain’s colonial interests off in China and India to the tea-side, and Africa and the East Indies to the sugar-side, with all the attendant horrors of the emergent slave trade conveniently swept under the (Persian) rug.

Tea. Photo par Hodge.

The conspicuous consumption tea represented was exacerbated by its price: before mass importation in the mid-century had driven costs down, the leaf itself was fixed at so extortionate a price (a bargain in 1680 was 30s a pound) as to necessitate the purchase of a lockable tea-chest, which would become the responsibility first of the lady of the house, and, when age-appropriate, of her daughter. The woman who held the key to the tea-chest was, naturally, also the woman who made the tea – thus ‘Shall I be mother?’, a phrase of uncertain origin. One theory I came across was that it is a Victorian idiom related to the phenomenon of women unable to breastfeed naturally using teapot spouts to convey milk to their infant instead. OH THE SYMBOLISM.

Whatever the phrase’s specific origins, it’s certainly true that from tea‘s domestic beginnings onwards whole family power structures could hang on which woman this ‘mother’ was. Alas, London’s major galleries forbid image reproduction (WAAH), but if you turn to your handouts,  you will see this in action. This is the Tyers family: that’s Mr Tyers on the left, and his son just down from one of the universities. His daughter, on the far right, is about to be married (she’s putting her gloves on to go out – out of the door and out of the family). Her role as tea-maker has, in consequence, passed onto her younger sister, who now sits as squarely in the middle of the family portrait as she does in the family sphere. Conversely, in Clarissa, when the heroine angers her parents they sack her from her tea-task and grotesquely divide it up among other family members (“My heart was up at my mouth. I did not know what to do with myself”, she recalls, distraught. I WANTED TO MAKE TEA!).

And she feeds you tea and oranges…

Of course, while assigning the tea-making to your daughter could be a loving gesture of trust, it also pimped her marriageability: it requires a cool head and calm demeanour to remember five-plus milk’n’sugar preferences, judge the strength of the tea and pour it, all the while making small-talk and remaining attentive to your guests. Add to this the weighty responsibility of locking the tea away from thieving servants and you have the management skills of housewifery in miniature. It also showed off physical charms: poise, posture, the elegant turn of a wrist, a beautifully framed bosom. To take this momentarily out of the salon, no respectable punter would get down in an eighteenth-century brothel without first taking tea with the girls: Fanny Hill spends at least as much time drinking tea as (That’s enough – Ed), and, of course, this kind of performative tea-ritual femininity is a mainstay in the professional life of the Japanese geisha.

So, along with its identity as a colonial mainstay in Britain’s trading life, tea in its origins is also something specifically feminine: a kind of Muse inspiring intellectual greatness, a Queen to be worshipped as a symbol of Britain’s health and power, and a key element in the women’s domestic lives. It could be stimulating, relaxing and seductive, but, as would become disastrously clear, it was always political.

NEXT WEEK: U is for Uterus