Jon Foster is currently starring in Ellen McDougall production of Idomeneus by Roland Schimmelpfennig which has entered its final week of performances at the Gate Theatre.
Troy has fallen – and the Cretan General Idomeneus is on his way home. But the Gods are angry (aren’t they always?) and so now Idomeneus must make a great sacrifice - but these sacrifices never pan out in the way we’d like them to. Now our General is really in trouble.
No stranger to the Gate, Jon has previously appeared at the theatre in The Trojan Women, Tenet, Dream Story and Mud. His other theatre work includes: A Beginning, A Middle and An End (Greyscale tour), Cheese (Fanshen, Barbican), Invisible (European tour), How To Tell the Monsters From the Misfits (Birmingham Rep) and, for the RSC: Little Eagles, A New Way to Please You, Speaking Like Magpies, Sejanus His Fall and Thomas More.
His television credits include: The Great Fire, Rev, The Smoke, The Town, Southcliffe, Mrs Biggs, Come Rain or Come Shine, Law and Order UK, The IT Crowd and Clone and film credits include: Expectation Management, Nice Guy, Love’s Kitchen and Abroad.
What were your first impressions when you came across Idomeneus?
It blew me away the first time I read it. Idomeneus is a really elusive sort of piece. It’s the kind of thing you read and it affects you. I gave it a quick read in about half an hour, I rattled through it and then sat there thinking for a couple of hours about what it all meant. Then, over the next day or so, I kept coming back to it – it’s one of those scripts which really gets inside your head. It’s an amazing piece of writing!
What can audiences expect? Like you, will they come away still trying to digest what they’ve just seen?
I hope so because that’s the aim, isn’t it? You hope people will leave thinking about the questions that the piece asks, they should interrogate what it’s all about and what their relationship is to the themes in the play. For me, in the work I do, I always hope that it’s going to provoke questions in the audience’s heads which they can take away and think about.
How would you describe the tone of the piece?
Good question because when you are doing a play which deals with such big, weighty issues such as life and death, relationships between father and son and revenge, you want to avoid being too portentous or too weighty and serious. When I was training I had a tutor who would say to me: “When you’re doing Hamlet, find the humour!” I think it’s really important to find those light moments.
It’s written in a very playful way which you might not necessarily glean from the first read, but when we started exploring it a bit more we realised there was some subtle, dark humour running through the play which we wanted to bring out. We wanted to tell the story in a way which is light and accessible and engaging but which also asks those questions. I think sometimes if you try to hit people over the head with questions they’re just not going to listen, so you need to draw people in very lightly so that, before they know it, they’re there with those big questions – it’s not been like a lecture.
What’s really interesting is that the lines which we say now are all very different to the original rehearsal draft. The picture is very much like looking at a story through about 10 different lenses. How do these 10 people view the story? How does a successful man see the story compared with a homeless guy, for example?
What makes Roland Schimmelpfennig’s writing so unique? His work has been translated into about 20 different languages and there doesn’t seem to be anything vaguely similar to Idomeneus on at the moment?
It’s really hard to say. The writing is incredibly economic, there is not one word in the play that doesn’t have to be there, everything is so rich but at the same time it has this incredible lightness. You could say it’s light on top with incredible depth. The economy of the writing is incredible, it’s got a real sense of poetry about it, but at the same time it’s very human, not poetic in the sense where you might not believe these people are in the room or speaking in this way. It’s got a very conversational tone which is also very profound.
Is it nice to be back at the Gate?
I adore it here. I think it’s my sixth show in the last couple of years. I love doing new writing and I think every piece I’ve done here has been a piece of new writing which is great. A lot of the time you have the joy of working with the writer and it’s the first time life has been blown into the text. There’s a great family feeling at the Gate, there’s no hierarchy whether it’s Chris or the ushers or whoever – everyone is on a very level footing, there’s a very democratic feeling.
Also, it’s a great space to perform in, enabling you to play in an intimate environment which you wouldn’t get in a West End theatre. I’m amazed every time I go as the space is always completely different to how it was the previous time – it’s so moveable. Every time I come back I think they can’t have another configuration but again this time it’s slightly different to anything I’ve seen before. The set design for this piece is really exciting which people are really going to enjoy.
Interviewed by Andrew Tomlins (Editor)
Idomeneus runs at the Gate Theatre until Saturday 19th July 2014.
Please visit www.gatetheatre.co.uk for further information and tickets.
Photo Credit: Bill Knight
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