The Uprising, Dir. P. Greengrass

"The Peasants are Truly Revolting: The Uprising (2026)"

Directed by Paul Greengrass

Distributed by: 

Focus Features (US)

Entertainment Film Distributors (UK)

Leonine Studios (Germany)

 

Produced by:

Thank You Pictures

Supernix

Blumhouse Productions

 

Reviewed by

Kevin J. Harty

La Salle University

harty@lasalle.edu

As earth-shaking as it must have been in its own day, the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt in England hardly registers today. COVID finds a ready precedent in the Black Plague of 1348—a point nicely made in a fresh reading of Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal by Dorsey Armstrong (see Cinema Medievalia, [2024] pp. 23-39). But what recent political upheaval, even if it echoes events in England in 1381, would have been carried out by disaffected citizens who even knew about this late fourteenth-century revolt?

Greengrass’s film is peopled with the correct historical personages—Richard II (a wide-eyed and eventually unnerving Woody Norman), John Ball (Jamie Bell), Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis), Joan of Kent (Katherine Waterston), the Lord High Treasurer Robert Hales (Tom Hollander), Archbishop of Canterbury Simon Sudbury (Stephen Dillane), and the Lord Mayor of London William Walworth (Jonny Lee Miller). But the hero of the film is an unnamed Ploughman (Andrew Garfield)—perhaps his name is Piers!—through whose eyes we see and judge the events that enfold when Richard’s council decides that it will raise taxes for foreign wars by levying a poll tax on the poor.  To levy the tax on the merchant class would mean sharing power with them; and the riches of the church are only stored up on earth for their use in heaven, or so the Archbishop of Canterbury would have his fellow privy council members believe.

Ploughman’s threadbare existence is all that much more miserable because of the death of his wife and two children from the plague. When the royal tax collectors descend upon his Essex village, they demand Ploughman pay either a death or a poll tax, neither of which he has any money for. As the king’s soldiers repeatedly sexually assault the village women to see if they are young enough to avoid having to pay the tax which has been levied on all those 15 and older, Ploughman steps in striking and killing one of the king’s men. Immediately sentenced to the king’s justice, hanging, Ploughman is rescued by his fellow villagers who rise up against the king’s men.

In nearby Kent, there are similar stirrings of civil discontent fomented by the itinerant and heretical preacher John Ball whose message calls for the abolition of the class system. The historical Ball was noted for his poetic eloquence; his most famous open-air sermon quipped: “When Adam delved and Eve span,/Who was then the gentleman?” In the film, Ball, freshly released from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s prison, has joined forces with Watt Tyler, the rebellion’s leader, and a former archer who served with King Richard’s father, the Black Prince, in France during the Hundred Years’ War. Soon enough, the fires of rebellion have been lit across southern England, and a force of some ten thousand or more marches on London to free King Richard from the evil councilors whom they argue have kept him prisoner. And indeed, Richard, only ten when he ascended the throne, was four years later under the control of his councilors, whose interests lay with themselves more than anything else. From the start, the mob’s loyalty in the film to Richard is remarkable—their affection for him is genuine. That he eventually fails to return that affection is the tragedy that informs the climax of the film. Both their initial affection and his royal betrayal have a basis in the historical record.

But what the peasants in the film seek involves a bit of garbling of history. The peasants maintain that the Doomsday Book records who rightfully owns what in England, and that subsequent charters issued after 1066 have appropriated and stolen wholesale what was rightly the property of the English. Indeed, the first thing the peasants do is burn all the charters and historical rolls that they can get their hands on, and they wish Richard to issue new charters for each town based on what is recorded in the Doomsday Book.

The march on London is to coincide with Corpus Christi, and there is hope that there will be multiple miracles—that of Corpus Christi itself, and that of the righting of all wrongs by God’s representative on earth, King Richard.  On route to London, Ploughman encounters the entourage of Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent, who historically was sympathetic to the Lollards and also Richard’s one honest councilor. The mob’s deference to her is a further testimony to their affection for King Richard—they do not seek to overthrow the crown. They seek a classless society under Richard’s beneficent rule—as impractical and impossible as such a society might be. And they do initially have the upper hand, as Richard’s armies are in Scotland and France fighting those foreign wars which those new taxes have to underwrite. So, Richard makes the extraordinary decision to meet with the mob, sailing down the Thames to hear their petition, but the sheer size of the crowd soon sends him scuttling back to the safety of the Tower. That petition calls for the abolition of the class system and the execution of the traitors—the members of the privy council.

Richard aligns himself with the Lord Mayor and the Merchant Guilds of London and throws his privy council under the bus—or onto the chopping block—as civil war and riot break out fueled by the poverty of the slumdwellers of London and anti-Dutch sentiment by overly protective English tradesmen.  Richard seems to agree to the demands put forth by Ball, Tyler, and Ploughman as a cadre of scribes begins issuing new charters for all the towns of England in preparation for yet another meeting with Richard, this time at the Priory of St. John.  With the aid of the Lord Mayor, Richard has managed to surround the priory with armed horsemen and archers, and he convinces the people to lay down their arms. When they do so, Richard directs that the newly sealed charters be burned, and that the crowds be slaughtered.  Tyler has already been killed, and Ploughman flees with a handful of followers.  Joan of Kent soon arrives to survey the carnage and looks with disgust on her son, who has now clearly grown from being a boy king frightened by his nightmares to being the living embodiment of a nightmare as king.

Historically, Richard did indeed betray the peasants, but it took him some time to hunt them down and punish them—there was no immediate mass slaughter at the priory. Ironically, Richard’s dealing with the peasants in the way he did, as ruthless as it was, did help him briefly secure his hold on the throne. The Lord Mayor did kill Tyler, under circumstances that remain unclear. But Richard would eventually be deposed in 1399 after a troubled reign—though how we view that reign today is largely influenced by Shakespeare’s depiction of the king in his Richard II. But Greengrass is not content to leave King Richard II’s story at the point where he betrays the peasants who have looked to him for justice.

An intertitle tells us that a year has passed, and we see Richard and his mother travelling under guard through a forest—surely not Sherwood Forest (!)—when they are set upon by a group of masked, long-bow toting men in (Lincoln?) green, who halt the royal progress, kill the king’s protective detail, and drag Richard out of his coach and into the mud. Their leader is, of course, the Ploughman, who decides that Richard isn’t worth killing—he’d only be replaced by another king. Ploughman may also spare Richard in a chivalric nod to his mother whose presence he acknowledges, and whose hand he had kissed when he encountered her on the road to London a year earlier. Ploughman doesn’t quite let Richard off scot-free; he curses the king, who began the film afflicted with nightmares, with even worse ones, and the last scene of the film is of the royal castle at night seemingly peaceful until the king’s terrified shrieks pierce the skies.

Even the most cursory search of the marketing history for The Uprising will reveal that the film briefly had a different, longer title with a colon followed by a subtitle—the kind of double-handed title that used to be de rigueur for scholarly articles of a certain ilk!—The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood. Without getting into the debate about the historicity of Robin Hood, any attachment of his rise to the reign of Richard II is a decided stretch, and a cinematic explanation of how Robin Hood became Robin Hood has already been on offer in Ridley Scott’s 2010 film Robin Hood, which also allowed Maid Marian a brief turn as a Joan of Arc figure in full armor for good measure.

Technically, The Uprising is sparse on dialogue—the film depends instead upon long stares and glances to convey the moods of its characters. Filming took place in Germany. Drones provided long camera angles with mixed results, while hand-held cameras produced some at times jerky close ups. The acting is consistently good—Garfield has established a successful career playing Everyman-like characters. Missing from the film is any love interest. Aside from Joan of Kent, the only woman with a presence in The Uprising is Alyce (Thomasin McKenzie), a former nun raped by a monk who gives birth to his daughter. The daughter is taken from her, and she is banished from her convent. She has joined Ball and his followers and tries unsuccessfully to cheer Ploughman up as they march on London. She survives Richard’s treachery, and is with Ploughman when he confronts Richard in the forest.

If Umberto Eco is correct in saying that we invoke the Middle Ages to meet the urgent needs of our times, then the connection between the post-plague trauma in The Uprising and our continuing reaction to the COVID pandemic is easy enough to make. Connections between the film and the modern political landscape might also be possible. The film tells of a disgruntled disempowered underclass who rise up in support of a leader whom they think will rescue them, who will abolish corruption, who will allow them to drive out foreigners, and who will right decades of wrongs, only to betray them and make their lot worse. Whether, with its mix of myth and history, the film is capable of supporting such a contemporary critique is another matter, and The Uprising may ultimately like those reciting the old children’s nursery rhyme “all fall down” in trying to do so. [The Peasants’ Revolt may be having a bit of a cultural moment. In the UK, Granta has recently published A. K. Blakemore’s massive 672-page novel about the event, Doom Painting. For a mostly positive review of the novel, see the TLS 4 September 2026: 26-27.]

THE UPRISING, written and directed by Paul Greengrass; produced by Jason Blum, Paul Greengass, Gregory Goodman, Joanna Kaye, Joe Neurater, and Lars Sylvest; starring Andrew Garfield, Jamie Bell, Stephen Dillane, Tom Hollander, Cosmo Jarvis, Thomasin McKenzie, Jonny Lee Miller, and Katherine Waterston; release dates 10 September 2026 (US) and 9 October 2026 (UK); running time 128 minutes.

Sarnoski, dir., The Death of Robin Hood

Not A Visit to Your Father’s (or Mother’s) Greenwood: The Death of Robin Hood (2026)
Written and directed by Michael Sarnoski 

Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty
La Salle University, Philadelphia
harty@lasalle.edu

On Thursday, June 18, 2026, the wire services carried the sad news that Sherwood Forest’s Major Oak had died. Long ailing and suffering from multiple misguided attempts to preserve it that only hastened its demise, the oak was the stuff of legend, in no small part because of its association with yet another legend, that of Robin Hood, who was said to have hidden his treasure and maybe even himself in the tree’s hollow. Estimated to be anywhere from 800 to 1200 years old, the massive tree with its twisted trunk measuring more than 36 feet in circumference finally succumbed to its own legendary popularity.  The ground surrounding it had been trampled down so firmly by centuries of human visitation that the oak’s roots could no longer absorb the water and nutrients needed to sustain it.

On Friday, June 19, 2026, US film audiences were treated to the death of yet another figure of legend—one associated with the Major Oak—Robin Hood himself in writer/director Michael Sarnoski’s The Death of Robin Hood, a film that charts the death of both the man and his legend.  Absent here is any hint of swashbuckling or derring-do. There is not even a hint of greenery. The film’s first half takes place in a cold, rock-strewn mid-thirteenth century England riven by blood feuds, not by conflicts between Saxons and Normans, or rich and poor.  If this world seems at all familiar, it is because it summons up that of Robert Eggers’s 2022 film The Northman with its never-ending, senseless violence.  Children have their throats cut or wander by on the screen with an arrow through their eye and sticking out of the back of their skull; farms are raided; families are burned alive. Lurching through this miasma of violence and destruction—and an endless cycle of revenge and retribution seemingly lifted from a medieval Scandinavian saga—where no one protects the meek is the hulking, yet much diminished, figure of Robin Hood (Hugh Jackman looking more like a wizened Gandalf than any of the dashing screen predecessors who assayed the role of the leader of the Merry Men of Sherwood). Indeed, there is no band of Merry Men—save for Little John (Bill Skarsgård)—no steely Maid Marian, no cruel Sheriff of Nottingham, no absent King Richard, no calculating Prince John, no corrupt bishop or abbot.  The only traditional villain to survive is Guy of Gisborne (Murray Bartlett), though he too is literally unrecognizable, reduced as he is (spoiler alert) to a dying leper bandaged from head to toe. 

Jackman has been down this cinematic path before in the James Mangold’s 2017 film Logan, where he also played the title role of legendary hero—the mutant Wolverine—in his last battle to defend a young, orphaned girl from those who would use her to satisfy their own evil ends. The film not only added to the Marvel X-Men series, but also anchored itself in another revered film genre, the Western, by providing Logan with a eulogy quoted from the ending of the classic 1953 George Stevens film Shane. Sarnoski too nods to the Western, providing viewers with separate but linked lengthy chases in his film’s two parts about a man in need of redemption. In a respite from the bleakness of the film’s first half, Little John deposits a badly wounded Robin at the Priory to St. Clement presided over by Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer).  

The priory is located on an island long associated since Druidic through Roman to Christian times with healing. Gathered at the priory are any number of orphaned children, and the sick and wounded in need of care, including the leprous Guy of Gisborne who has appointed himself ferryman and protector for the island. Soon enough, the now-dead Little John’s daughter Margaret (Faith Delaney) arrives, followed not long afterwards by Arthur/Godwyn (Noah Jupe), a teenager robbed of an eye by Little John’s long staff who is intent on murdering Little John’s daughter and Robin to continue the blood feud in which they all are caught up.  Hiding one’s identity is a key narrative element throughout the film given such endless feuds, thus Arthur is really Godwyn, Randolph is really Robin, and Edward is really Little John. Sister Brigid will also be linked to such a feud when we (and she) learn that years ago Robin burned her husband and children alive.

As the film opens, Little John seeks out Robin for helping in rescuing his wife, Maragret of the hair red like a sunset, from farmers who have kidnapped her—Little John having himself stolen their land. If Robin is unapologetic about his violent past, Little John is nostalgic for a past that never was. He asks Robin, in a nod to the ballad tradition about the hero, whether they killed or simply stripped the potter naked. Robin’s response is that there was no potter. Nods to other ballads inform the film’s narrative. In the film’s version of “Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne,” Robin cuts off the ear of his nemesis, but doesn’t kill him. Its version of “The Death of Robin Hood” turns the murderous vengeful Prioress who bleeds Robin to death into Sister Brigid, at first vengeful but then grateful that Robin’s violent past made her present life of healing possible. Here her allowing Robin to die is an act of mercy, that recalls Audrey Hepburn’s Marian’s poisoning herself and Robin for the same reason at the end of Richard Lester’s 1976 film Robin and Marian—a film originally entitled The Death of Robin Hood. 

But Sarnoski’s take on the entire legend is that it is all fake, all made up.  Robin was a thief, a brigand, a murderer. He never robbed the rich and gave to the poor. He defended no one but himself. He did not oppose illegitimate authority; as a figure of anarchy, he undermined all authority. The attempt to rescue Little John’s wife proves to be a fiasco. She is killed; the farm is burned; and Robin is badly wounded.  Soon after, Little John himself is killed, leaving his young daughter, also named Margaret, at the mercy of those who would exact endless revenge for feuds real and imagined. Only Robin, and refuge with Sister Brigid, can save her. Young—or, as she is called, Little—Margaret comes to play a traditional role in Robin’s death, firing an arrow into where sea and air meet at the moment of his passing. Tradition has it that, on his death bed, Robin fired an arrow out a window asking to be buried where it landed. Other odd medieval bits pop up in the film such as a voice off screen singing “Sumer is icomen in,” and the Leper’s telling Robin the story of Boethius’s encounter with Lady Philosophy before his torture and death.

Umberto Eco pointed out that we are always messing around with the medieval to meet current needs. The history of screen Robin Hoods dates to at least 1908; his television counterparts, to at least 1953. The three really great Robin Hood films—the Fairbanks, the Flynn, and the Connery/Hepburn—all nod to the wars surrounding their release. In the minds of many, we live today in a world without real heroes, a world where fake news elevates the villainous to the pseudo-heroic.  Perhaps, this is the point Sarnoski is attempting to make. Helen Cooper once said that each age reinvents the King Arthur it needs. Maybe the same is true of Robin Hood. David Lowery recently gave us a reconstruction of a segment of the story of King Arthur in his 2021 film The Green Knight. Sarnoski takes matters a step further. He does not reconstruct; he deconstructs, presenting viewers with a frightening journey into a Greenwood that never really existed. How satisfying that journey ultimately is will depend upon the individual viewer.  But those interested in a more interesting, and successful, deconstruction of the myth of Robin Hood might want to turn to Amy S. Kaufman’s wonderful 2025 novel The Traitor of Sherwood Forest. 

The Death of Robin Hood, written and directed by Michael Sarnoski; starring Hugh Jackman as Robin Hood, Jodie Comer as Sister Brigid, Bill Skarsgård as Little John, Murray Bartrlett as the Leper/Guy of Gisborne, Noah Jupe as Arthur/Godwyn, and Faith Delaney as Little Margaret; produced by Lyrical Media and RPC; distributed by A24; US release date June 19, 2026; running time 122 minutes.

Wagner, Tristan and Isolde, The Metropolitan Opera, 2026

The Metropolitan Opera’s 2026 Production of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde

Reviewed by Kathleen Coyne Kelly

Northeastern University

        Dare I plunge into their aroma and breathe my last? 

        Into the surging swell, into the ringing sound into the waves of the universal breath! 

        Subtitles. Isolde (Lise Davidsen) singing the Liebestod in the Met’s 2026 Tristan und Isolde

                                                                                                                (Listen to an excerpt here.)

 

Timothée Chalamet, in a March 2026 CNN and Variety town hall with Matthew McConaughey, declared: “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera, or, you know, things where it’s like, Hey, keep this thing alive, even though it’s like, no one cares about this anymore. All respect to the ballet and opera people out there.” A vigorous backlash immediately followed. The Metropolitan Opera responded on Tiktok by showing a montage of workers employed by the company—painters, lighting crew, scenic carpenters, set designers, costume makers, and, finally, and rather waggishly, musicians, singers, and the conductor (“This one’s for you, Timothée Chalamet . . . 👀”). Boundary-pushing Misty Copeland came out of retirement to crash the Oscars during the rendition of the Best Original Song nominee, “I Lied to You” from Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025)— challenging Chalamet, perhaps, who was sitting in the audience. In the film (as in the Oscars performance), as Sammie (Miles Caton) plays the blues, the scene becomes hallucinatory as Black dancers and musicians—West African dancers, a banjo player, a rapper, breakdancers, Crip-walkers—and a ballerina—mirror the rhythms of the song in their different ways.

To reference Chalamet when writing about the ballet or the opera is about to become a trope. 

One opera that is being kept alive is Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which premiered in 1865, and has been performed thousands of times since. Some classics endure because of the weight of tradition, and simply cannot be abandoned. Tristan und Isolde falls into this category—and believe me, I do not want to see it sink into oblivion and be forgotten. Yet I want something more from this Gesamtkunstwerk (a “total, or integrated, work of art” to which Wagner aspired)—and something that it chooses not to offer. Unsophisticated as I am when it comes to opera, I want a hummable aria or two, a bravura performance to be lifted out of the opera and enjoyed, rather than the unendliche Melodie that Wagner actually wrote, resisting what he saw as the staleness of Grand Opera. What I am denied is precisely the point: Wagner never resolves his harmonies, literally; rather, he counts on dissonance—in Tristan und Isolde, this phenomenon is known as “Tristan’s chord”—leaving us hung up, waiting for resolution, which we do not get until the very end, in Act III, when Isolde sings her celebrated aria. The most famous fan of Wagner captures the essence of Wagner’s Tristan: “Powerful waves of tone flood the room, and the murmur of the wind gives way to a terrible roaring frenzy of sound.” So wrote Adolf Hitler, aged seventeen, after seeing a performance at the Vienna Opera House. 

And thus I invoke another trope: one cannot write about Wagner without pulling in Nazis.

Tristan und Isolde, this Musikdrama (a term Wagner detested, but was burdened with because he insisted that he was not writing opera), is one thing in its score, not to be deviated from by the faithful (or, at least, not by much), and quite another in its staging, where directors can innovate, making that “terrible roaring frenzy of sound” visible in their own idiom. One can interpret the music, but one can go further and invent the staging. This practice has come to be called Regieoper (“director’s opera”), a mode very much embraced by Wagner’s grandson Wieland, who directed Wagner’s operas in the 50s and 60s at Bayreuth (and was influenced by Wagner’s own set designer, Adolphe Appia). Staging thus becomes the site of the supplement, if not that of fan fiction. 

In the Metropolitan Opera’s recent production of Tristan und Isolde (March 9-April 4, 2026; I watched it streaming in a movie theatre in Massachusetts), director Yuval Sharon explores the opera’s obsession with the mystical and eros and thanatos (the spectre of death makes possible love and passion; love and passion transcend death) by creating a set that makes the mystical legible. The music remains untampered with (but perhaps over-conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin), but the spectacle is a very twenty-first century Regieoper—spare, tonal, and wholly dependent on technology. And Sharon put a baby in it. I’ll get to that. First, let me describe the set.

The Met stage is enormous. It is 80 feet deep, 103 feet wide, and 54 feet high. Sharon exploits this scale by creating two horizontal planes, one at the level of the stage, which takes up about one quarter of the space, and another that fills the rest of the expanse above it. Act I opens with a woman and a man sitting across from each other at a table—a prop repeated and repurposed throughout the opera—at stage level. Something is obviously not right between them: they look as if they desire to speak, to bridge the gulf across the table, but they hesitate, pull back. This scene is duplicated above them, projected on an enormous screen. At first, this feels disorienting, but soon resolves into recognizable allegory: Sharon wants to contrast “this world of the table and this world of the fable” (as he said in an interview given during one of the streaming intermissions). The earthly versus the mythical. At stage level, mere humans reside, playing out the short span of their lives; above them, legend endures, is amplified. Larger than life, as the cliché goes. (See Figure 1.) This is a trick that Sharon uses throughout. Moreover, Tristan (heroic tenor Michael Spyres) and Isolde (dramatic soprano Lise Davidsen) are given body doubles with whom they exchange places, moving from the stage to the set of circles and ellipses above, which slide in and out of one another, sometimes creating a Venn diagram, sometimes a crescent, sometime a full circle. (These circles may well have been borrowed from a previous production; see here.)

 

Figure 1. A scene from Act II of Tristan und Isolde (courtesy Karen Almond)

In Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan (c. 1210), Wagner’s ostensible source, the giant Morgold demands tribute from King Mark, and is killed by Tristan. Wounded, he can only be cured by Queen Isolde of Ireland, mother to Isolde. When Isolde discovers that she has helped heal her uncle’s murderer, she seeks vengeance. (Gottfried died before finishing his poem, stopping at around 19,000 lines; it breaks off as Tristan is debating whether to marry Isolde of the White Hands. The poem was then continued by Ulrich von Türheim [1235] and Heinrich von Freiburg [1290]). Wagner heightens the drama by betrothing Isolde to Morgold. Isolde’s desire thus shifts from revenging an uncle to revenging the man she loves—and the only thing that remains of her love is rage. She had faltered once, in Ireland, when she lifted her sword to kill Tristan as he lay recovering—but as their eyes met, she dropped the sword. Isolde has regrets. As the pair sail to Cornwall, Isolde plans to kill Tristan and then herself. She sings of her anguish and pain and persuades Tristan that he must atone for killing Morgold. Tristan acquiesces in her plan for them to drink poison together. (In Gottfried’s telling, the two drink the potion accidentally.) But Brangäne (mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova), knowing Isolde’s intention, intervenes, and gives Isolde the love potion intended for King Marke instead of the poison. (At stage level, the table is now set with an array of glass bottles filled with elixirs of various colors.) Isolde’s frustrated fury is now turned into desire for her enemy. Tristan’s homosocial bonds with his King cannot withstand newly-aroused passion. We have reached the end of Act I.

In Act II, Tristan and Isolde tryst while the King is away hunting. The scheming courtier Melot (Thomas Glass) has set a trap, as Brangäne had warned Isolde, who ignores her. The lovers sing their ecstatic and despairing Love Duet. (“Tristan is Isolde, Isolde is Tristan,” they sing; listen to part of it here.) They are caught, and King Marke (bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green) is heartsick and bewildered. (Listen to an excerpt here.) On the stage level, the table holds the remains of a feast, and above, magnified, hands attempt to piece back together a broken plate on the table. Marke asks, how can there be anything like truth if Tristan is capable of betrayal? And Isolde? Marke may have owned her, but he never possessed her, he realizes. Melot wounds Tristan, and the curtain panels fade to grey, signaling the end of the act, as Tristan’s loyal companion Kurwenal (bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny) catches Tristan as he falls.

Act III demonstrates just how long a death scene can be drawn out. At stage level, the table is transformed into the operating table on which Tristan lies. Surgical instruments are laid out on a cloth. Kurwenal anxiously wonders if Tristan is sleeping or dead. Tristan repeatedly revives, asking after Isolde. Kurwenal wonders again, is given hope again. Tristan moves from the plane of the stage to the circle above, accompanied by dancers in white (which I found unnecessary and distracting) whose ghostly presence makes it clear that this iteration of the circle is a threshold—heaven, or perhaps a blissful nothingness, lies beyond. Does Kurwenal see the white sails? Each time that Kurwenal answers no, but soon, Tristan falls back as if dead, and then revives to ask again. Isolde is too late, of course. Tristan dies on the table as she bends over him.

Throughout the opera, Isolde has worn green; Tristan, blue. The costumes are medievalish; they register as mere costumes, and deliberately so, I think: the fabric is too shiny, the trim seems cheaply made, as if to remind us that what we see are people in dress-up. In this final act, Isolde wear a voluminous, rather shapeless, green satin gown, and as she enters the scene, the audience immediately sees that she is pregnant. She crawls onto the table on which Tristan lies and gives birth. Marke enters, and explains that Brangäne has confessed to administering the love potion, and Marke now forgives Isolde and Tristan. Who can be faulted for the compulsions of rapturous desire? 

Isolde moves from the plane of the stage where humans dwell to the circle above, the plane of the eternal (where the dancers in white annoyingly return, making their Alvin Ailey moves). Her green dress has been exchanged for a simple white shift. A light grows behind her, into which she will soon walk. But first, she sings a final aria, familiarly known as the Liebestod (“love-death” song—though Wagner preferred Verklärung, “transfiguration”). This aria is intended to release the disharmonic tension built up over the four and a half hours of the opera. Isolde sings of watching Tristan rise, radiant, to dwell on an even higher plane than the stage can offer. Is it only she who can hear him singing? She finds herself rushing upwards to meet him. The narrative arc of this aria, as some critics have ventured to suggest, seems to move from initial arousal through to orgasm. (Slavoj Zižek called it “orgasmic self-extinction.”) The love in “love-death” is as physical as it is numinous. She dies. Marke takes the baby and, with Brangäne, exits the stage. The opera is over.

In this final act, the table seems to gesture toward the ending of Jean Delannoy and Jean Cocteau’s L’éternel Retour (1943). Tristan/Patrice (Jean Marais) and Isolde/Natalie (Madeleine Sologne) lie in death side by side on an upturned boat that transforms into a gisant, a tomb effigy. The baby in Sharon’s adaptation of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde might be read as a materialization of l’éternel retour, a concept Cocteau introduces in the opening crawl in the film, here translated: Eternal Return—a title borrowed from Nietzsche—means that the same legends are reborn again and again without the heroes’ knowledge. Eternal return of simple circumstances is the base of all great love stories. This registers as an exquisite tautology, given that Nietzsche was so taken with Wagner’s opera. If the allusion to L’éternel Retour is deliberate, it is rather obscure. (How many medievalists and cinephiles are in the audience each night at the Met or in the movie theatre?) It doesn’t really help us understand why Sharon put a baby where there has never been one. It undermines Cocteau’s (mis)reading of Nietzsche’s point, that some of us are caught in an endless cycle of destructive passion from which we cannot escape—and the only (Wagnerian) response is amor fati. 

Or perhaps Sharon wanted to give us a comfortable ending; new life traditionally signifies hope. Or is the baby a booby prize for Marke?

But there is yet another possibility, one that suggests that Sharon was not willfully rewriting Wagner through staging. Perhaps Sharon understands something about Wagner’s psychology, his apparent fervid and overripe romanticization of eros as Woman, capital W. In 1854, as Wagner first began thinking about Tristan und Isolde, he wrote to Franz Liszt, and declared a desire for “a female spirit in which I could completely submerge myself, that would hold me entire—how little would I then need of this world” (as quoted in Eva Rieger, Richard Wagner’s Women). At the time, Wagner (then married to Minna Planer) was caught up in what we would today call a head affair—in this case, an all-consuming, obsessive affair—with the married Mathilde Wesendonck. Sexual consummation was out of the question. Tristan und Isolde, it could be argued, became the sublimated substitute. What could be more of a tribute to Woman than highlighting the most transcendent expression of her essence—birthing a baby?

Given all the controversy and provocations that Wagner and his operas have caused, given the debates about how to make sense of Tristan und Isolde, we might read the baby in yet another way: its presence on stage deconstructs the entire opera so that it goes poof. Es verschwindet. This creates the necessary space for the next production. Thus the opera (writ large) is kept alive.