Dolan Cummings
posted 12 June 2005

If history is written by the winners, love stories are generally told by losers. Love, after all, never ends well. The story of Tristan and Yseult is told here by White Hands, the leader of the chorus of Love Spotters, the unloved, who bumble about the theatre dressed in anoraks and balaclavas. Losers. But most of the time, the lovers aren't much better off. 'I was born in sorrow, for pity's sake,' Tristan tells anyone who will listen. As the champion of Cornwall's King Mark, he is sent to Ireland to bring back the vanquished Morholt's sister Yseult to be Mark's queen. You know the rest, even if you don't.

It's how the plot unfolds that matters. Kneehigh make the ancient Celtic legend new and vital, and though the message is no more uplifting than it was in the hands of Richard Wagner (whose wonderful Tristan and Isolde embodies the philosophical resignation of Arthur Shopenhauer), it is certainly satisfying as theatre. Kneehigh's approach puts a premium on storytelling, but this does not mean the script is privileged over other aspects of theatre. At a National Theatre Platform event about the production, director Emma Rice described how the company develops its work by involving everyone in brainstorming and experimenting with ideas about how to tell the story. The script is a product of this process rather than a pre-existing guide to the production, giving the whole thing an impressive artistic coherence of which Wagner would surely have approved.

The set of Tristan and Yseult, a large round platform with a mast, is raised so that most of the audience look up at the action like children. (The play was originally performed outdoors, so the effect would have been even more pronounced.) This is an unexpected echo of Wagner's design of the Bayreuth opera house, which makes the stage seem further from the audience than it really is, creating the illusion that the performers are literally larger than life. While Kneehigh otherwise seem light years from Wagner's high modernist approach to theatre, which keeps the audience in darkness and silence rather than handing them sweets, this echo is enough to provoke a further comparison between the declamatory style of Wagnerian performance and Kneehigh's 'school of shouting and pointing' (as one critic apparently put it). But Rice draws the line at warbling: the show's live music is sort of folk cabaret.

The music is particularly important in the first big love scene on the ship back to Cornwall, in which the giddiness of infatuation is expressed through dance, with hypnotic gipsyesque music swirling the lovers about the set. And it is in the awkward interplay of the physical and the psychological that Tristan and Yseult comes to life. Craig Johnson as Yseult's maid Brangian is a star of the production, and has particular fun with the love potion scene, urging the soon-to-be-lovers not to mix up Yseult's potion (to help her face marriage with a man she has never seen) with Tristan's wine. 'Potion, wine - wine, potion. Have you got that?' Of course, both drink heartily from both bottles, but White Hands sensibly doubts the whole potion business: 'In my experience, a love potion is just an excuse for wild abandonment with one you already love'.

But it's that 'already love' part that remains a mystery. Love is presented very much as something that happens to people, not something that people have any conscious part in. This may seem intuitively true, but it invites further doubt along the lines begun by White Hands. Might not Cupid's arrow be a convenient cue for the pursuit of unmysterious desires and interests? But the play has little time for agency or decision-making of any kind. Nobody seems to have much control over anything, echoing Wagner's pessimistic conception of love this time. The closest thing Tristan and Yseult has to a hero is King Mark, who is bound both by his duty as a king and by his love for both Tristan and Yseult. His heroic act is to forgive their humiliating betrayal, to accept his unwishedfor fate.

The Love Spotters meanwhile are obsessed with love; but they are consumers of love stories, not participants, not even as unrequited lovers. Love is 'at arm's length' for them. The audience can only be appalled; we can't possibly identify with the unloved, and nor should we. Indeed, the whole point of the play is to refute the Hollywood vision of love as the preserve of the chosen few, the beautiful people, whose unglamorous sidekicks are allowed only cutely comical affairs with equally goofy partners. Against this, Tristan and Yseult asserts the reality of love, painful as well as joyful, as something we live rather than consume.

The aspiration, perhaps, is less to make 'realistic' theatre than to use theatre to affirm the reality of the audience's own experiences. At the Platform, Rice gave a good example of how Hollywood-style conventions distort our understanding of our own lives. She admitted to never having had a shouting argument. I can't say I have either, come to think of it, and yet from watching films and TV you would think there must be something wrong with us both. But those who learn about life from Dawson's Creek must lead pretty strange lives of their own.

This is not to say that Kneehigh don't use artistic conventions. The point is rather that these conventions are used in the service of the story, and not instead of a story. For example, the two writers took on two different aspects of the play, Carl Grose scripting the court scenes in iambic pentameter, while Anna Maria Murphy wrote for the more emotional characters. The exacting, rules-bound nature of verse underlines the dutiful character of Mark. Meanwhile, Tristan frequently reverts to French, a use of artistic licence (if anything the character should speak Breton) which conveys his self-absorption while playing on our perception of French as an especially sexy language. For her part, Yseult is repeatedly carried away in Hungarian, leaving the audience behind, but adding a passionate exoticism to the character's romantic reverie.

In other ways too, the play's structure and language embody its theme. Recorded excerpts from Wagner's music drama are played at various points throughout the play, and one scene in particular is echoed in this version of the story: the lovers' first illicit rendezvous in Cornwall. In Tristan and Isolde, after an extended discourse on whether the lovers are indeed reunited, affirming that it really is 'your eyes, your lips, your heart' that each encounters, Tristan and Isolde sing together, 'Is it no dream? / O rapture of my soul / sweetest, highest / boldest, loveliest / blissful joy!' This is followed by a breathtaking rapidfire exchange of superlatives: 'Unparalled!' 'Supreme pleasure!' 'Supreme joy!' 'For ever!' ' For ever!' 'Unimagined, unknown!' 'Overflowing, sublime!' 'Overwhelming joy!' 'Entrancing bliss!' etcetera.

This scene takes on a more philosophical bent in Tristan and Yseult. 'What is love?' 'It is a promise.' 'And a lie.' 'It is the roar' 'And the whisper' 'It is hope' 'And despair' 'It is being found' 'And getting lost' 'A wish' 'A curse' 'Which is which?' 'Which is worse' 'What does love mean?' 'It doesn't mean anything' 'It is everything' 'It is nothing' 'A shadow' 'And a blinding light' 'The sensation of…' 'Senselessness' and so on. In both versions, the scene is not so much a dialogue as a verbal joust, albeit a beautiful one, reflecting the paradox that the very intensity of their passion traps each character in his/her own self, each living for rather than with the other. And that is their tragedy. But tragedy is as intoxicating as any potion, for the unloved White Hands as much as the lovers themselves, which makes her a dubious guide to love. 'The truth is out, like the baby with the bathwater,' she tells us. I'm not so sure.

National Theatre run over - touring autumn 2005.