Tristan
& Yseult Revisited
The West Coast American
premiere of Cornwall’s Kneehigh Theatre’s production of Tristan & Yseult for the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, a review
of the January 5, 2014 evening performance.
Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty, La Salle
University (harty@lasalle.edu)
The
story of Tristan and Yseult (both names, especially hers, have variant
spellings) is the great love story of
the western Middle Ages, and it has resonated since the Middle Ages in any
number of genres. Joan Tasker Grimbert’s
Tristan and Isolde, A Casebook (1995;
rpt. 2002) remains the indispensable source for studying the legend in its multiple
retellings. But, briefly, the story of
an early pair of star-crossed lovers, which preceded by centuries that of Romeo
and Juliet, found a literary home in the works of writers as diverse as the two
Anglo-Norman writers Béroul and Thomas d’Angleterre, Eilhart von Oberge,
Gottfried von Strassburg, Friar Róbert (who wrote in Old Norse), Sir Thomas, Malory,
Tennyson, Swinburne, and Updike, as well as an equally rich home on canvas
when, in the mid-nineteenth century, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Morris and Burne
Jones eagerly took to the story as the subject of their work. Film embraced the legend from at least as
early as 1909, and, of course, Wagner coined the term Liebestod to describe the fateful ending of the eponymous heroes in
the final aria of his 1859 opera Tristan
und Isolde.
Cornwall’s Kneehigh Theatre’s
production of Tristan & Yseult at
the Berkeley Rep is a distinctly Aristotelian production. No, not the Aristotle of The Poetics who defined tragedy
and spoke of the unities all stage plays should have. Rather, the Aristotle of The Metaphysics who wrote of certain works of art in which the totality is not, “as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something
besides the parts” (or, perhaps more familiarly, in which the whole is greater
than the sum of its parts). Kneehigh’s production
of Tristan & Yseult is definitely
a play whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Kneehigh’s approach to
the legend is a mix of the comic and the tragic, of stage play and stage
musical. Added to the legend here is a
chorus of the unloved (the Love Spotters)—costumed not unlike a bunch of
modern-day geeky birdwatchers—indeed, all the actors wear modern dress. Upper house right is home to a musical combo,
whose chanteuse, Whitehands (Carly Bawden), functions as magistra ludi for the whole production, while also filling the role
of the legend’s second Yseult (she of the white hands). When first conceived as a stage project (Emma
Rice adapts and directs from a script by Carl Grose and Anna Maria Murphy), the
play was envisioned as a site-specific outdoor production at Rufford in
Nottinghamshire and at Restormel Castle in Cornwall. London’s National Theatre then picked up the
original production and moved it indoors, and sent it on tour nationally and
internationally. Now, some ten years
after the original production, it has come to Berkeley for its American West
Coast premiere. I
In Kneehigh’s view, the
legend retains its power because of the endless series of loveless worlds into
which it has been adapted. To suggest
such continuing universal relevance and resonance, in this production Tristan
(Andrew Durand) first speaks in French; Yseult (Patrycja Kujawska) first sings
in Hungarian; Giles King’s Frocin’s blind devotion to King Mark (Mike Shepherd)
is more than tinged with the homoerotic; and the same actor (Craig Johnson)
plays the roles of both Morholt and Brangian. If in medieval Cornwall, the love
of Tristan and Yseult dare not speak its name, in present day California, fresh
from a successful fight for same-sex marriage and in the midst of a continuing debate
over additional rights for the transgendered, too many loves have been
constructed as unnamable.
The timelessness of the
legend is further underscored by the modern set and costumes, by the musical score which blends the Prelude to
Wagner’s opera and “O Fortuna” from Carmina
Burana with some playfully
effective variations on songs by Willie Nelson and Roy Orbison, and by Andrew
Durand’s Tristan with his torso tattoo of an outline of the borders of the
state of Georgia underneath which are written the words “on my mind.” Just
as for Ray Charles, so too for Tristan:
Other arms reach out to me
Other eyes smile tenderly
Still in peaceful dreams I see
The road leads back to you.
I must admit that, at first, I couldn’t decide
whether the tattoo was permanent or part of Durand’s make-up and costume, but in
the final analysis it makes no difference.
That the tattoo is integral to the production, and to Kneehigh’s
approach to retelling the legend, is clear since it is featured prominently on
the program cover and on advertisements for the production.
Even
before the production begins, the Love Spotters interact with the audience
moving between the house and the stage, taking notes, searching with
binoculars, and distributing heart-shaped bits of paper. To the accompaniment of Wagner’s Prelude,
they explain how, for them, “Love is at arm’s length.” They are soon joined by Whitehands who
welcomes the audience to the Club of the Unloved, whose members stand “on the
sidelines” as they tell a love story of “blood and fire,” a story they (and we
in the audience) are all in, “all of us.”
As the dying Tristan appears crying “Noir ou blanc?” Whitehands notes:
“He need not fear entry
into our club, for he has been loved enough to save a thousand loveless
souls. But this is the end: and you
cannot have an end without a beginning.”
The audience, later inflating the white balloons
distributed to them with their programs, will further become participants in
the production when they join with the Love Spotters to celebrate the marriage
of Mark and Yseult.
King Mark then enters
with the ever-oleaginous Frocin at his side, as both describe the
Cornish-centric loveless world in which they live—“the best kings rule not with
their hearts, but with their brains.”
Indeed, war, not love, is in the air, as the Irish King Morholt
threatens invasion, and Tristan arrives at court, his very birth seemingly a
warning against love:
“Je suis né en tristesse,
par pitié,
Contre tout conseil ma
mère a suivi son coeur.”
Morholt’s entrance through the audience with a
band of thugs in effect puts the audience under lockdown, and leads to a
confrontation first with Mark and then with Tristan –“If there’s anyone I hate
more than the Cornish, it’s the French.”
While Mark and Frocin quickly capitulate, Tristan challenges Morholt and
is stabbed in the side, but not before driving his knife through Morholt’s
eye. The suddenly courageous Mark boasts
that he will now he will marry Yseult not out of love, but out of revenge for
Morholt’s numerous past transgressions—
“For every life you stole
every village you burned, every unjust step you took on this soil.”
—and the still bleeding Tristan is quickly
dispatched to Ireland to retrieve Mark’s bride.
The events that take
place in Ireland are familiar enough—Yseult unknowingly heals Morholt’s
murderer, Tristan, and both fall in love with each other after they (here
willingly) drink a love potion—but the casting of the same actor who has just
played Morholt as Yseult’s faithful maid, Brangian, is as disconcerting as it is
in keeping with Kneehigh’s reinterpretation of the legend. If the legend is ultimately the celebration
of a love so pure, so unfailing, so timeless, and, therefore, so rare, how
better than the casting of a frumpy male Brangian to emphasize that point? When on the wedding night, Brangian must
substitute herself for the now no longer virginal Yseult and then in the
morning slip out unnoticed from under Mark as the sullied Yseult takes her
place, it is with Brangian that we are meant to sympathize and identify, for we
and our fellow Love Spotters, like her, yearn more than anything else to be
loved:
“I shook like a leaf.
He whispered, ‘Be calm,
sweet one’—
But of course I could not
speak.
He inhaled the scent of
the flesh
As if he wanted to
remember it.
And then . . . then I
felt the weight of him,
Oh Lord!
My knees quaked, my hands
trembled,
My stomach turned
somersaults. . . .
But last night it was me
who was beloved.”
Of course, we know all
too well, that in the world of Tristan and Yseult love is doomed to fail. Mark will not in the end be deceived—Frocin
makes sure of that. And here Frocin is
more the stereotypical mean-spirited dwarf of medieval legend. His devotion to Mark is not just that of an
overly dutiful servant to his master. Frocin’s
obsession with exposing Tristan and Yseult’s affair to Mark seems rooted as
much in jealousy as it is in loyalty—jealousy because he is unloved, and
jealousy because the object of his affection seems to be Mark. While Mark here may, despite Frocin’s machinations,
waver in his desire for revenge, this somewhat sympathetic portrait of Mark would
not be the first recent one. Rufus
Sewell’s Mark in Kevin Reynold’s 2006 film Tristan
+ Isolde breaks with tradition in being a sympathetic, if not wronged,
figure.
Tristan
is finally, as in the legend, deceived by Whitehands:
“You want to know?
You really want to know
if your precious Yseult is coming? . . .
Black. The sail is black.”
and both Tristan and Yseult die. But the play’s coda is delivered by an unusually
pensive Mark (again in Kneehigh’s version there are interesting shades to his
character):
“Where does all the
wasted love go?”
—as Tristan and Yseult join the Love Spotters—
“It is hard to keep
things white:
Dirt loves it, blood
loves it, sin loves it.
If one were baptised in
black,
It would not show the
dirt picked up along the way.”
In a world (both on and off stage) so lacking in
love, where indeed does all the wasted love go?
Cornwall
has long been that forgotten fifth part of Britain. Yet it is also, perhaps, fittingly, if not
ironically, home to one of the most unforgettable love stories, as Kneehigh’s
production makes clear. Emma Rice notes
in the preface to the printed text of the play that this production of Tristan & Yseult is “my letter to
love . . . simple in its telling and true to the heart of the ancient myth.”
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Kevin J. Harty
La Salle University
