Theatre in Review: Tristan & Yseult (St. Ann's Warehouse) Emma Rice calls herself a director and adaptor, words that don't begin to capture her achievements. Really, she's a tightrope walker: Her standard MO is to adapt a well-known property into a theatrical extravaganza that humorously comments on its source material while holding onto its original appeal. It's a conjuring trick, and I can't think of anyone else who can do it. Her take on Wuthering Heights combined knockabout gags with scenes of sizzling desire and savage fury. She spoofed the clipped dialogue and repressed emotions of Noel Coward's film Brief Encounter, while giving full value to the churning emotions under the surface. Such acts of legerdemain are challenging enough; with the medieval legend of Tristan and Yseult, Rice is working without a net. Only a fool would bet against her, however. Aided by writers Carl Grose and Anna Maria Murphy, plus a fine design team and a superhumanly agile cast, Rice puts her singular brand of sorcery to work. Drawing on a treasure trove of pop culture memes and employing disguises, physical theatre, puppetry, scenic effects, and some extremely athletic choreography, she and her collaborators construct an entertainment that nimbly treads a narrow path from farce to full-out, honest-to-God Liebestod, all the while asking, why does the idea of romantic tragedy have such a hold over our collective imaginations? The show maintains the legend's basic contours, running comic rings around its details. Tristan, the Cornish warrior, fights off an invasion by the Irish warlord Morholt, bringing back Yseult, the Irish princess, to marry Cornwall's King Mark. Thanks to a love potion, carelessly left out, Tristan and Yseult fall -- truly, madly, deeply -- for each other. She is determined to secure a royal alliance with the king; however, circumstances intervene, and the lovers ultimately face exposure, exile, and death. It's a stark piece of folklore, often treated with the greatest seriousness. (Among other things, it was a primary source of Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, and by association, T.H. White's The Once and Future King and Alan Jay Lerner's book for Camelot.) At St. Ann's, however, something is up when the usher asks, "Do you have a latex allergy?" before handing out a balloon for an audience-participation gag. Additional clues: The set, a ship's deck and gangway, by the late Bill Mitchell ("refreshed" by Vicki Mortimer), features a neon-style sign for "The Club of the Unloved." Chief among the latter's membership is Whitehands; a sinister oracle in dark glasses, dressed in mid-twentieth-century couture (plus tennis shoes); she presides impassively over the action, providing a coolly skeptical countermelody to the surging central love/death theme. By her side is a chorus of "Love Spotters," lost souls, in hoodies and windbreakers, who sing, play instruments, and assume various minor roles. Mining a vein of humor that extends from Peter Sellers and Monty Python to Garry Starr, of Modern Penguins infamy, and employing music ranging from Les Baxter's easy-listening lounge melodies to "Love Hurts," a medley of heartbreak hits, and grand opera, Tristan & Yseult, nimbly blends slapstick and sorrow, alternating strenuous dancing and physical gags with an imposing stillness in the face of implacable fate. As passion's playthings, blown about by circumstances, John Leader (Tristan) and Nandi Bhebhe (Yseult) easily command the stage; given her distinctive voice, it's a pity she doesn't have more to sing. Surrounding them are Tom Fox, double-cast as Morholt (here conceived as a gangster out of a Guy Ritchie film) and as Brangian, Yseult's handmaiden, who takes her mistress' place on her wedding night, preserving the illusion of virginity. This switcheroo poignantly evokes desires in Brangian that she never knew she had, the first in a series of revelations that sends the play veering toward tragedy. Matthew Churcher scores in the choreographed sequences as King Mark's servant Frocin, fending off legions of soldiers with his bare hands while lip-syncing the high soprano line in a mambo tune. (Given the number of bodies hurled or jumping off the stage all night long, the two large mattresses at left and right more than justify their presence.) Frocin, a malevolent elf with a duplicitous soul, also appears hoisted over Tristan and Yseult, capturing their intimacies with a Polaroid camera. Stephanie Hockley authoritatively comments on love's unreliability as Whitehands, who, late in the action, crosses paths with Tristan to fatal effect. The set design easily accommodates the cast's nonstop comings and goings, plus extensive action scenes, musical interludes, and flying actors; at one point, an entire forest is conjured out of the deck. Malcolm Rippeth provides uplighting effects, chases, spinning patterns, and blinder cues, as well as compellingly complex beam arrangements. The costumes, also by Mitchell and Mortimer, include many variations on deely boppers; at one point the company enters sporting forest greenery, echoing the arrival at Birnam Wood at Dunsinane. Simon Baker delivers various sound effects -- flying arrows, sirens, Klaxons, and explosions -- along with musical selections ranging from Carmina Burana to Tristan and Isolde's Prelude and Liebestod. His reinforcement of the band and actors maintains an ideal musical-vocal balance. This is a remount of a very early Rice effort, and, for a while, I thought it might end up a tad overstuffed with college-level gagging -- an entertaining evening, to be sure, but one lacking the emotional pull of her later offerings. But the second act effectively darkens by degrees, arriving at a finale with the stature of classic tragedy, followed by a thought-provoking coda. Even under the spell of Rice's remarkable zest for storytelling, a question lingers: Why does the Tristan-Yseult story haunt us, returning time and again in stories, poems, and songs? Is it because, deep down, our entire culture is lovesick? And does that intoxicating feeling have anything to do with the reality of love? --David Barbour 
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