The
lines between pleasure and pain keep blurring in Kneehigh Theater’s
ecstasy-drunk “Tristan & Yseult,” which opened on Monday night at St. Ann’s Warehouse
in Brooklyn. This is true not only for the doomed-to-love title
characters, who notoriously have that whole Eros and Thanatos thing
going, but also for the audience in their thrall.
Long
stretches of Emma Rice’s ever-surprising adaptation of an ancient tale
of fatal adultery feel like a giddy party, though one at which the
guests are perhaps trying too hard to have a good time. Bring out the
balloons! Raise your glasses! Sing along with the band!
Then,
before you know it, you’ve been ambushed by a sorrow that makes your
eyes sting. And with that startling sadness comes the realization that,
all along, a jagged heart has been throbbing at the center of these
merry revels. You understand what one of the show’s characters, a
cuckolded king who is no longer sure whether to rule with his heart or
his head, means when he proclaims, “Let ambivalence come.
It
isn’t just your usual waffling, shuffling ambivalence that’s at work
here, though. As was demonstrated in another Kneehigh hymn to the
transporting and ruinous nature of love, its stage version of the movie
“Brief Encounter,” this Cornwall-based British company does nothing by halves, even when it’s dealing with division.
Like that earlier production, first seen in New York at St. Ann’s in 2009 and on Broadway
the following year, “Tristan & Yseult” is equal parts exaggerated
whimsy and overwhelming rue. It presents romantic passion as a force
that makes lovers levitate (and I mean literally) and then sends them
crashing to the earth. And, like “Brief Encounter,” it also reminds us
that such extremities of feeling are hardly an everyday occurrence.
There
are those who, like Shakespeare’s Othello, love not wisely but too
well, and those who regard the emotional pyrotechnics of such
relationships with awe, envy and relief. In this production, as in life,
the voyeurs are in the majority. They may take comfort, though, from
the realization that, at least in “Tristan & Yseult,” they also
serve who only sit and watch.
Everyone
in the shape-shifting ensemble of this show — directed by Ms. Rice and
written by Carl Grose and Anna Maria Murphy, with genre-straddling music
by Stu Barker — appears at some point as part of the chorus of losers
called the Lovespotters. They are dressed like binocular-toting
bird-watchers in heavy weather, in anoraks, knitted caps and eyeglasses
made to be steamed up.
First
seen bumbling through the audience and singing karaoke standards like
“Love Hurts” with the onstage band, they are gathered at a place
identified by a wan neon sign as the Club of the Unloved. (Bill
Mitchell’s set, with lighting by Malcolm Rippeth and sound by Gregory
Clarke, appropriately combines heroic grandeur with schmoic cheesiness.)
Before
beginning the narration of the woeful epic they have to share, they
describe themselves as “love watchers, kiss clockers” for whom “love is
at arm’s length.” They are an exceedingly twee group, the kind who don
dopey insect-antenna headpieces to amuse themselves. And while I was
intrigued by their severely smart leader, a pillbox-hatted woman called
Whitehands (Kirsty Woodward), the prospect of spending two hours with
this frolicsome lot caused my heart to sink a little.
Even
once the plot takes over — and yes, it’s more or the less same one that
inspired Wagner’s opera — the cuteness quotient remains high. The
medieval war between Cornwall and Ireland is rendered as a disco dance
with a body count. The Cornish king, Mark (Mike Shepherd), speaks in
skipping rhyme, and his too loyal aide-de-camp, Frocin (Damon Daunno),
comes across as a Jim Carrey-ish hyper-exhibitionist.
This
is all lively and amusing enough, but it’s the familiar stuff of antic
undergraduate revues, as practiced for decades by fans of Monty Python
and the Goon Show. And then it hits you that all this silliness is only a
frame for the contemplation of something profoundly serious.
That,
of course, is the all-consuming phenomenon that the Lovespotters live
to find evidence of. It is embodied with a gravity and urgency that defy
flippancy by the French knight Tristan (Dominic Marsh), who is
recruited to cross the sea to fetch the Irish princess, Yseult (the
elfin beauty Hannah Vassallo), for King Mark, who intends to marry her.
And
when Tristan meets Yseult, well, you know what happens. It involves a
love potion, a long and heady boat trip and a bed trick in which her
ladyship’s loyal maid, Brangian (Niall Ashdown), takes her place on her
mistress’s royal wedding night to make the king believe that Yseult is a
virgin.
But
you don’t know the inventive forms these events will take in this
production, which uses visibly homemade technology (wires, ropes,
harnesses) to send ships sailing and its leading lovers spinning through
space. Tristan and Yseult kiss, writhe and dance on air, and when they
touch ground, they’re groggy endorphin addicts, reluctant to come off
their altitudinous high.
By
rights, they should seem at least a little laughable. But this
production has a stunned respect for the sacred and profane attraction
that animates these two, as well as a wondering awareness of what
Whitehands describes as “the harm love can do.” Even poor Brangian’s
deflowering by the king, accompanied by a ravishing musical setting of
Emily Dickinson’s “Wild Nights,” is no occasion for mockery.
Mr.
Ashdown, who has been playing his female character in the jovial
tradition of a music hall cross dresser, is transformed into a figure
rattled but ennobled by sexual initiation. And what might have
registered as a dirty joke becomes a stirring interlude of melancholy
beauty.
This
crossing of emotional boundaries, which sabotages our typical
programmed responses as an audience, is the shaping force of “Tristan
& Yseult.” And I can’t think of another company that achieves this
dynamic as vividly and unexpectedly as Kneehigh does.
The
music, which includes a devastatingly deployed recording of Nick Cave
and the Bad Seeds’ “Sweetheart Come,” embraces an equally varied
palette. At times, it has the boozy, bittersweet dopiness of songs
played on a tavern jukebox just before last call. But when Wagner’s
unearthly “Liebestod”
from “Tristan und Isolde” is heard, you don’t doubt that this canny
(and uncanny) production has earned the right to include it.
