Idomeneus, Gate Theatre

The Trojan war is over and it’s time for the victors to go home. 

Inspired by Homer’s Iliad, multi award-winning playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Idomeneus tells of a Cretan King whose ship is overcome by a storm while voyaging back from the ten-year war against Troy. He strikes a deal with Poseidon: his life in exchange for that of the first soul he meets on dry land. But the course of God-placation never did run true in Ancient Greek myth, and the first soul he meets turns out, rather predictably, to be his son. 

Thus begins a fraught, tempestuous tale of a man hurled between fear and anguish, love and unfathomable guilt. But resemblances to classical Greek storytelling end there. In this UK premiere performance, discrete scenes, acts and all other aspects of theatre’s internal scaffolding fly out the window.  From the moment you enter the performance space, crawling through a porthole of an upturned ship, the characters roam the stage pronouncing on their fates in a bold, arresting, and emotionally charged tapestry of voices.

Roland Schimmelpfenning is one of Germany’s best known playwrights, and the country’s most performed dramatist. He has been the recipient of swathes of the its most prestigious literary awards including the 2012 Mülheim Prize (Germany’s highest playwrighting honour) for his bizarre and fascinating The Golden Dragon, which premiered to huge acclaim in New York in 2013.

He’s credited with a unique, self-invented style of theatre which involves actors breaking character, and the fourth wall, at frequent intervals in the storyline. What emerges – a peculiar meeting of naturalism and high concept – has proved to be a directorial handful in the past, and earned him comparisons with the far-reaching abstract ideas of Pablo Picasso .

This production, directed by Secret Theatre at the Lyric Hammersmith's Ellen McDougal, looks to be in good hands. She brings with her a wealth of experience adapting classical theatre, and her youthful, vital stagings of Antigone and Philoctetes at The Unicorn Theatre in 2012 were received by critics with great aplomb.