Tristan & Yseult

by Carl Grose and Anna Maria Murphy

seen at Shakespeare's Globe on 22 June 2017

Emma Rice has adapted and directed the original Kneehigh touring production of Tristan & Yseult for this revival at Shakespeare's Globe, where Dominic Marsh plays Tristan and Hannah Vassallo plays Yseult with support from Mike Shepherd (King Mark), Niall Ashdown (Brangian and Morholt), Kyle Lima (Frocin) and Kirsty Woodward (Whitehands), and various musicians.

It's an eclectic piece, with various songs and ballads of loneliness and difficult love, an occasional use of the opening of Wagner's prelude to establish serious intent, imposing verse speaking from King Mark and a more conversational tone from almost everyone else, modern dress which somehow looks timeless, but sailing ships for transport and only knives and fists for weapons.

The rambling story is held together by narrative comments from Whitehands, a primly dressed young woman (pale yellow twin set, white gloves and handbag) representing members of the 'Club of the Unloved' who are otherwise dressed in dark blue anoraks and nerdy balaclavas, all sporting black-rimmed spectacles and looking extremely geeky. Only when these people take on parts in the play do they begin to look like individuals.

There is a great energy to the play, though I am not sure why it needed to begin with a tableau of Tristan on his deathbed and then recap the situation (this seemed a little contrived, and confusing for those unfamiliar with the story). Neither Tristan nor Yseult had an engaging personality; they were rather just buffeted and overwhelmed by the passionate connection between them. However, this was no disadvantage, since in some ways, the closer one tries to attach modern expectations of character to their situation, the more tawdry their behaviour might appear. The opening scene of the second half, in which  Yseult's maid Brangian is persuaded to occupy King Mark's bridal bed so that he will conclude that he is consummating his marriage with a virgin, risks looking very tacky once stripped of the literary flourishes of the medieval poets who deal with it. Here the sting is largely drawn by the comic element of having Brangian played by a man, though this in turn subverted the hapless reflections of the servant after the deed was done.

The elemental nature of the story is better served by not looking too closely at the protagonists but rather by attending to the situation. There is plenty of scope to establish the swaggering and bellicose masculinity of King Mark's court (and in particular of his sycophantic courtier Frocin, who imagines he will be rewarded for forcing his king to see his wife's adultery) and the sheer physical exuberance of combat in the confrontation between Tristan and Morholt. The growing passion betweeen Tristan and Yseult begins with innocent attraction, complicated by boiling anger when Yseult realises he is the murderer of her brother, and then ignited by the fateful love potion, which is followed by an almost balletic encounter of swaying and swooning bodies. 

There are a number of touches reminding us of the antiquity of the story - not least the fact that Tristan initially speaks in medieval French, and Yseult in Irish; the members of the Club of the Unloved, who are busy managing all the stage effects, have to remind them to speak English so that the audience can understand them, but there is something poignantly elemental in Tristan's initial almost desperate announcement 'Je m'appelle Tristan'.

The final scene in which the lovers die, here partly precipitated by the bitterly disappointed Whitehands who has married Tristan but realises he has no eyes for her, is accompanied by the soaring conclusion of Wagner's Liebestod. Though the cast has been mildly cynical about Wagner's music (too highbrow for their general endeavours), and though this music in the opera is strangely uplifting rather than tragic, here, as Yseult collapses when she cannot revive the limp Tristan, it brings a lump to the throat.