“If there be a hell upon earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man’s heart,” wrote Robert Burton, whose 1621 work The Anatomy of Melancholy attempted to pin down this elusive and then-fashionable condition. In the decades before, John Dowland had epitomised melancholy in his lute songs. Up close in the Pit theatre, the director and video artist Netia Jones brings Dowland together with Burton and other writers in a production for the countertenor Iestyn Davies and lutenist Thomas Dunford that is somewhere between a staged recital and a mini-opera.
The intimate set, with the audience on all four sides, is a room with a desk covered in pot plants, coffee cups, laptop and books. Glass cabinets contain more plants plus test tubes of coloured liquid. Davies – his voice subtly amplified, singing tirelessly but looking haggard under Stevie Porter’s cool lighting – moves restlessly between them, looking for answers. Dunford sits with his back to him, bent around his lute. Singing and playing as one, they were in the room together and yet alone, so much so that it seemed almost wrong to see their faces together as drowning men, one of many images in the videos projected on to four wall-like screens above.
