Iestyn Davies sings Dowland in The Pit from Wednesday 16 to Sunday 20 September 2026, in Netia Jones's staging of melancholy after Robert Burton.
Iestyn Davies was born in York in 1979, sang as a boy treble in the choir of St John’s College, Cambridge from the age of eight, found the countertenor voice in his teens at Wells Cathedral School, and went back to St John’s as a choral scholar to read archaeology and anthropology. He is now the countertenor most often named when people who do not follow early music are asked to name one, an MBE and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, and the voice is the reason: clean, unforced and entirely without the hooting that puts people off the register.
An Anatomy of Melancholy takes John Dowland’s songs and sets them against Robert Burton’s 1621 treatise on the same subject. Netia Jones created it, directing and making the visuals, and it had its premiere on this stage in 2022; Emma Doherty directs this revival. Mónica Pustilnik plays the lute. Dowland spent his life writing about it and signed himself semper dolens, always grieving.
It runs in The Pit from Wednesday 16 to Sunday 20 September 2026, seventy minutes without an interval, performed in the round. Dowland spent his career writing about sorrow and signed himself Semper Dowland, semper dolens, and the argument of the evening is his: that melancholy is a condition to be dwelt in rather than cured.