Atri Banerjee, Assistant Director of Dido, Queen of Carthage, which started its run on Tuesday, believes that “the show and its location go hand-in-hand”.

Dido, Queen of Carthage will be staged in the Emmanuel College Chapel as well as in the Senate House, two venues which Banerjee tells me were specifically chosen because the Marlowe Society “wanted the audience to see Dido’s court in its resplendent baroque splendour.”

They hoped that the lavish interiors of both buildings, combined with Purcell’s music, would “construct a heavy atmosphere” that would leave the audience feeling “intoxicated”.

Setting Dido, Queen of Carthage in two buildings as steeped in history as these also had the effect of transforming Aeneas and his army – dressed as modern soldiers – and the gods – donning black-tie outfits – not to mention the audience themselves, into anachronistic figures. This allows the audience “to see what happens when the two worlds, temporal and spatial, collide.”

Given the unconventional venues for the show, some additional considerations had to be made. In the Emmanuel Chapel, for instance, the actors had to be especially conscious of how they orientated their bodies as they moved along an aisle flanked by a seated audience.
The difference in size between the intimate chapel and the much larger Senate House also had to be taken into account. Says Banerjee: “In the chapel, you’d walk three steps to get from point A to B, while in the Senate House, you’d need nine steps. It was almost like choreographing a dance!” 

Dido, Queen of Carthage is one of several shows in Cambridge to have been staged in a chapel or church this term.

The Ghost Hunter, by London-based performance group Theatre of the Damned, is now on tour and will be on at the Leper Chapel of St Mary Magdalene tomorrow evening. The Leper Chapel, which was built around 1125 and once belonged to a leprosy hospital, is thought to be the oldest surviving building in Cambridge.

Stewart Pringle, the show’s writer, says that he first visited the chapel in 2008 when reading for a Master’s degree at Jesus College. The building immediately struck a chord with him. “I liked the idea that a group of people who were shunned still had a place for worship. It’s a beautiful building, with a huge amount of character.”

Pringle adds that the Leper Chapel is an apt venue for the play, given how the story, set in York, is “about why places become haunted. It contains negative memories of contagion… of The Black Death, a dark, sad period in British history.”

But the decision to go slightly off the beaten track does not always work to a show’s advantage. When The Spanish Tragedy was staged at King’s College Chapel last year, reviewer Fred Maynard complained that the actors were dwarfed by the play’s formidable setting, adding that “many people further back couldn’t hear a thing: the echo of the Chapel, so good for choral music, swallows up anything but the most crisply pronounced verse into a melisma of sound.”

The Cambridge University Gilbert and Sullivan Society’s week five freshers’ show, HMS Pinafore, on until tomorrow in the Upper Hall of St. Andrews Street Baptist Church, initially faced a number of logistical challenges.

Producer Lucy Kessler, who says that the venue was chosen because of its central location and good acoustics, admits that the society has had to hire and install its own truss, scaffolding, lights and cables for the show. The absence of a backstage crew room also means that actors have to be escorted from a holding room upstairs whenever it was their turn to go on stage.

But these are challenges that Kessler, and the other shows’ producers, have risen to with gusto. As Pringle tells me: “The Ghost Hunter is a flexible piece, and quite informally staged. We will be responding to the building, rather than dragging the whole theatre production inside it.”

Site-specific theatre is usually a more prominent feature of Easter Term. While the wealth of outdoor and promenade Shakespearean productions taking place then are always fantastic, it’s good to see these ideas being expanded into other terms’ theatrical calendars.

Acoustic problems aside, let’s look beyond the usual auditoriums and remember the great potential of the fantastic architectural sites we’re lucky enough to have in Cambridge.