Euripides is not just any old Ion

ION GATE,W11

IN the programme notes for Ion, the Gate's artistic director, Erica Whyman, stresses the topicality of her new spin on Euripides. Which is just as well, for its supposed political relevance would otherwise have passed this viewer by. Whyman's production foregrounds the play's personal stories, of a mother reunited with her long-lost son and of an orphan boy who discovers his celestial provenance. On Soutra Gilmour's bold, zigzagging, boardwalk set, this is effective, stripped-back storytelling, with an emphasis on the spoken word. Its claim, however, to ask "serious questions about the nature of power and accountability" is a tenuous one.

The production works best when it takes itself least seriously. Stephen Sharkey's translation puffs away some of the classical cobwebs. The temple of Apollo at Delphi, where the action unfolds, is described as if it were (as it is today) a tourist hot spot. Characters exchange wryly knowing dialogue.

"Did you get drunk?" young Ion asks the visiting Athenian, Xuthus. "Course I did," comes the reply. "It was a Bacchic revel." Sam Kenyon as the titular waif finds precisely the right lightness of touch to undercut the story's clunkiness without undermining the tale itself. Michael Brophy's denim-clad, northernaccented Xuthus is as full of bold purpose as he is empty of wit.

When he is told by Apollo to take Ion as his son, his wife's handmaidens (Lara Marland and Melissa Collier) chorus the doomy implications for Athens.

Proceedings pall slightly - and the pace, never very dynamic, ebbs - when Kenyon's Ion is swept offstage. Between them, Suzanna Hamilton's Creusa and Alfred Hoffman's tutor can't suggest the elemental rage that might motivate their plan to dispatch Xuthus's newfound boy.

Mark Lockyer as the narrator draws more attention to his actorly virtuosity than to the events of the drama.

Whyman grapples heroically with the denouement, which sees the company whisper Apollo into being to untangle the story's knots. But the mode escapes her that might prevent Euripides's conclusion - that we needn't worry, because God'll sort everything out - from seeming both dramatically, and politically, disappointing.

Until 1 June. Box office: 020 7229 0706.

Copyright 2002
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