A Love Story and Its Voyeurs Kneehigh Theater's ‘Tristan & Yseult’

By BEN BRANTLEYNOV. 24, 2014

Dominic Marsh and Hannah Vassallo star in "Tristan & Yseult," a Kneehigh Theater production with spectacle and a chorus of Lovespotters, at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

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.”

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Hannah Vassallo, aloft, with Lovespotters in “Tristan & Yseult,” directed by Emma Rice. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

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.

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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.

Tristan & Yseult
Adapted and directed by Emma Rice; written by Carl Grose and Anna Maria Murphy; music by Stu Barker; musical director, Mr. Barker; designed by Bill Mitchell; lighting by Malcolm Rippeth; sound by Gregory Clarke; produced by Paul Crewes; production manager, David Harraway; company stage manager, Steph Curtis; technical stage manager, Aled Thomas. A Kneehigh Theater production, Ms. Rice and Mike Shepherd, joint artistic directors; chief executive and executive producer, Mr. Crewes; associate director, Simon Harvey; general manager, Charlotte Bond; presented by St. Ann’s Warehouse, Susan Feldman, artistic director; executive director, Andrew D. Hamingson. At St. Ann’s Warehouse, 29 Jay Street, at Plymouth Street, Dumbo, Brooklyn; 718-254-8779, stannswarehouse.org. Through Dec. 14. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
WITH: Kirsty Woodward (Whitehands), Dominic Marsh (Tristan), Mike Shepherd (King Mark), Damon Daunno (Frocin), Hannah Vassallo (Yseult), Niall Ashdown (Brangian), Róbert Luckay and Tom Jackson Greaves (Lovespotters, Brutes and Animators) and Stu Barker, Lizzy Westcott, Justin Radford and Pat Moran (Musicians).