Idomeneus

Following last year’s revitalising ‘Henry the Fifth’ at the Unicorn Theatre, which blew every ‘grown-up’ production of the play for the last a decade out of the water, its director Ellen McDougall here produces what is visibly its spiritual successor. Taking Roland Schimmelpfennig’s beautiful 2009 play about the doomed Cretan king as its text, ‘Idomeneus’ sees McDougall continue her sharp critique of the history of violence, the latest entry to a body of work which is as humane, pacifist and playful as it is intellectually acute.

Schimmelpfennig’s writing is arrestingly spare, a chorus of voices which toss and tumble the story of the king’s misery in multiple sequences and versions, making lucent poetry of the hurly-burly of history, with all of its possible misreadings and misrememberings.

McDougall splits the text among a group of apparently unconnected and unremarkable characters, almost like a group of distant co-workers on an away day, reliving antiquity as a team-building exercise. They play through the story of Idomeneus’s return to his wife and child in a series of tentative recreations, improvising new details and possibilities as they go.

McDougall’s command of the simplest of staging elements to produce profound effects is on show here as it was in ‘Henry V’, as cups of water become weapons and balloons transform into a monstrous chimera. She also directs a great cast, with Mark Monero in particular adding a vital air of gravitas as proceedings become increasingly anarchic.

He frequently takes on the role of Ideomeneus, maintaining the bearing of a king even when the stage is filled with sprays of glitter, blood-black ink and the sad corpses of spent party poppers.

The messiness of war is given an obvious visual counterpart as the stage becomes increasingly trashed. But there are also quieter moments, such as when the king contemplates the possibility of war suddenly ripping through his beloved family, which are bone-dry and harrowing.

It’s another winner for the seemingly bulletproof Gate, further proof that McDougall is one of the most exciting directors around, and above all a play of rare beauty by Schimmelpfennig. It’s a story that calls to the present from a harsh distance, broken and buffeted as it makes its way across the ages towards us.