Things have not been going well for Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon. First, her father attempts to sacrifice her in return for the winds to carry his fleet to Troy. Then, when she is spirited away by the goddess Diana, she finds herself installed as priestess in Diana's temple in the barbarian land of Tauris.
All that Iphigenia, eminently sensible girl that she seems in Catherine McCormack's attractively low-key performance, wants to do is return to Greece and break the family curse that has led to generation after generation of butchery. But the king of Tauris, the grizzled Thoas, wants to carry her from the altar to the marriage bed. Then a couple of strangers arrive, and one of them turns out to be Iphigenia's brother, Orestes, bearing bad news.
Goethe's 1786 version of the ancient Greek tragedy gets a terrific new adaptation by Dan Farrelly and a production that, in its stylish simplicity, strikes contemporary chords that remind us that cycles of murder and revenge are a curse of societies both ancient and modern. Even so, there is probably more plot and angst than the 90 minutes can bear and, for all its restrained beauty, the evening never - to borrow one of Farrelly's elegant phases - "twists the heart". It engenders neither pity nor fear, rather the kind of mild curiosity you experience when seeing something familiar under a microscope.
Its beautiful remoteness is perhaps due to the fact that Euripides is filtered through Goethe's high moral sensibility, and that the debate between humanitarianism and barbarianism, and hope and despair, is never a real one. Joe Hill-Gibbins's production, however, makes it slip down fairly easily, and as is so often the case at the Gate, the acting is faultless and invigorating.
· Until December 13. Box office: 020-7229 0706.
