Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
✭✭✭✭✩
by Roland Schimmelpfennig, translated by David Tushingham, directed by Alan Dilworth
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
March 8-24, 2018
The story dramatized in Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Idomeneus is one of the most ancient Soulpepper has ever staged, yet under Alan Dilworth’s direction it feels uncannily modern. The play is not only about storytelling, but also about how every version of a story can be true in its own way. Dilworth has forged his 10-member cast into a tightly bound ensemble that lends this tale undeniable power.
The story is best known to most people from Mozart’s opera Idomeneo (1781) based on the same legend. On his way home after 10 years fighting in the Trojan War, Idomeneus (Stuart Hughes), King of Crete, encounters an enormous storm. Idomeneus prays to the sea god Poseidon that if the god saves his life, he will sacrifice the first living thing he meets on shore. As fate would have it, that first living thing is his son Idamante (Jakob Ehman).
In one version, the king kills his son and is in turned killed by his outraged people. Then a chorus member (Frank Cox-O’Connell) insists that is not what happened, and the performers play out the more familiar version where Idomeneus refuses to kill his son, but that refusal to honour a promise to a god leads to the outbreak of the plague in Crete. Thus, in either version Idomeneus is punished.
As in Schimmelpfennig’s The Golden Dragon seen at the Tarragon in 2012, the story is told by a chorus whose members take turns narrating. Some chorus members become main characters for a while before rejoining the group, looking like ghosts risen from funerary ashes. The purpose of some of Dilworth’s ideas are unclear – such as the use of an electronic sound to signal scene changes and the rushing of the cast about the stage before each new scene.
Nevertheless, when Hughes’s Idomeneus speaks at the end about hanging onto life, his unsettlingly mixed tone of defiance and doubt chills us with the play’s underlying point. Is life worth living when divorced from everything and everyone a person has loved?
Although just over an hour, Idomeneus digs deeper than many other much longer plays into questions of what makes life worth living and what makes stories worth telling.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in NOW Magazine on March 3, 2018.
Photo: Michelle Monteith as Meda, Stuart Hughes as Idomeneus and Jakob Ehman as Idamante. ©2018 Cylla von Tiedemann
For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.
2018-03-13
Idomeneus