English Touring Opera's autumn season has a mythological theme, which, in practice, means operas about women getting left behind. Touring alongside Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice is a compact double bill at Hackney Empire, London, pairing Purcell's Dido and Aeneas with Elena Langer's Ariadne - a 20-minute scene for soprano setting words by Glyn Maxwell, premiered by Almeida Opera in 2002.

Langer's mini-opera is essentially a monologue, sung persuasively here by Jessica Cale, her powerful soprano diamond-bright. Anna Morrissey's production, though, has six people on stage: abandonment feels like something active as well as passive. It begins with Theseus leaving, disentangling himself from both the sleeping Ariadne and the red thread that links them, spooling from a heap on the floor - it's as if he got back from the labyrinth the night before. When Ariadne wakes he's still there, pacing in the shadows or turning her bed on its rotating platform.

Meanwhile, Rebecca Meltzer creates a compelling schoolyard staging of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, conjuring a strikingly different mythological world. Because nothing says 'ancient tragedy' like a playground power dynamic.