Performer: Christopher Robson

Metastasio's tale of noble Roman suicide was made into a pasticcio by Handel in 1732: and, after 283 years of silence, returned to the London stage as part of the 2015 London Handel Festival. 

Fact is, they say, stranger than fiction. Damon Albarn’s latest foray onto the operatic stage certainly makes strange the true-life story of Elizabethan intellectual and philosopher John Dee.

A career woman, a femme fatale, a shop girl, an actor, a teacher, an idler, a biker, a priest, a bank clerk and five circus acrobats. These are not the figures that come to mind when we think of Purcell’s Fairy Queen.