Tragic lovers given riotous reboot
Tristan & Yseult Shakespeare’s Globe
Emma Rice’s Tristan & Yseult is a blast of defiantly silly but touching escapism at a time when we need it most. The Kneehigh theatre production, first seen in 2003, has become something of a cult classic among fans of the Cornish theatre company’s followers, and it loses nothing of its original sheen in this latest outing at the Globe.
In this take on the legend, the young French Tristan, having killed the Irish invader Morholt, is sent by his king to Ireland to bring back Morholt’s sister Yseult, so the king can marry her (still with me?)
Tristan and Yseult drink some love potion on the return journey, which results in – well, you can guess – emotional and sexual mayhem on a prodigious scale.
With a poetic, postmodernist script by Carl Grose and Anna Maria Murphy, which, by turns, mocks the tragic lovers’ legend while wringing it for all its emotion and melodrama, the production has all the ground ling pleasing knockabout humour and direct engagement that is the calling card of the Globe. It wilfully, shamelessly, and entirely successfully mixes the ancient with the modern, combining a live band playing everything from medieval ditties, to Irish reels, samba and modern pop (“We’re up all night to get lucky”) which draw the audience into the party atmosphere.
It’s a chaotic hotch-potch, designed by the late Bill Mitchell, at times reminiscent of screaming children let loose in the gym on the “apparatus” – one imagines the stage directions are along the lines of “they run about and jump on the mats a bit” – at other times achingly elegant, as Tristan (Dominic Marsh channelling the lean, dark-eyed looks of Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love) and Yseult (Hannah Vassallo, an impish, Oirish Kate Bush) swoon into slow-motion embraces on circus ropes.
Compellingly sexy and vibrant though the leads’ performances are, the show is, however, stolen by Niall Ashdown as a pantomime-style old maid in a slip, as well as a chorus of anorak-clad bird-twitchers, a kind of modern take on the mechanicals from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Complete with an increasingly absurd array of Eighties-style antennae headpieces, these geeks observe the action as the pitiful representatives of the world’s great unloved, throwing in show-stopping gymnastics when they are least expected.
After reaching its comic crescendo halfway through, the play then becomes a moving reflection on the intoxication of love and love lost, and I defy anyone not to think, with elegiac wistfulness, of the “one that got away” in their youth as the story moves to its tragic conclusion.
Until June 24. Tickets: 020 7902 1400; shakespearesglobe.com