It takes a director of great vision, skill and, frankly, courage to tackle a revered masterpiece and transform it into something much finer.

Yaron Lifschitz is just such a director, and his new production of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas – a co-production by Opera Queensland and Circa – dares address the inherent shortcomings of the late-17th-century opera and its libretto by Nahum Tate.

As told in Book IV of Virgil’s 12-book Aeneid, it is Juno and Venus who bring Dido and Aeneas together, and Jupiter through Mercury who drives them apart. Tate stripped them away, replacing them with a ‘Shakespearean’ coven of witches and a Spirit instead of Mercury.

As a result, a tumultuous love affair that should have reverberated with the repercussions of the Fall of Troy as well as anticipating the might of Rome became little more than an intimate tête-à-tête.

Lifschitz restores the mythic scope of Virgil’s epic, and by Jove, it’s a masterstroke!

All of sudden, the earth-shattering events that only rate a mention in the libretto regain their seismic force, and the story becomes a thrill ride to be enjoyed by young and old, as all myths should be.