One of the leading countertenors of his generation, Iestyn Davies sang Dowland in The Pit, in Netia Jones's staging of melancholy after Robert Burton.
Countertenor Iestyn Davies sang Dowland in Netia Jones’s staging of melancholy after Robert Burton, in The Pit at the Barbican Centre, from Wednesday 16 to Sunday 20 September 2026. Mónica Pustilnik accompanied him on lute.
Davies was born in York in 1979 and sang as a boy treble in the choir of St John’s College, Cambridge. He found the countertenor voice in his teens at Wells Cathedral School, then returned to St John’s as a choral scholar to read archaeology and anthropology. He is an MBE and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music.
An Anatomy of Melancholy sets John Dowland’s songs 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.
Dowland spent his life writing about melancholy and signed himself semper dolens, always grieving. One of his best-known songs opens with the line “Flow, my tears, fall from your springs.”
Emma Doherty directed this revival in the round, with voice and lute at its centre and Jones’s visuals around them.