"On his way home/from Troy,/the city which has fallen/after ten years of war,/Idomeneus,/King of Crete,/runs into a storm,/a violent storm,/a hurricane/so terrible/that none of the ships,/none,/none of the eighty ships/ with which he/left for Troy/ten years before,/to destroy the city and its people,/can stand up to the waves high as towers,/except for the King’s ship itself.…"

So begins Roland Schimmelpfennig’s new play about the Cretian king Idomeneus. Fearing for his life, Idomeneus swears to make a sacrifice to the gods and unwittingly puts his own son’s life on the line.

"With quiet insistence, Gosch talks about love. He does so by extricating individual characters, figures or even entire scenes, from the choral piece, as delicately as ever. In doing so, he separates the fate of the individual from the fate of the masses, without playing one off against the other. It is the volume of the statements that highlights and characterises this difference. At the Agora, the masses suffer loudly; individuals seek seclusion in remote places. Gosch uses beguilingly simple means to tell this tale. […] The sublime way that Gosch slips inside Schimmelpfennig's text, drawing out its central contradiction and presenting it on stage, is fascinating. Death and love don't go together; but with Gosch, they do – because death is viewed through the eyes of love. This is what's so staggering and magnificent about this production: not just that the actors’ eyes look upon the world from such varying perspectives, but also that their expression changes constantly."
Frankfurter Rundschau