A Love Story and Its Voyeurs
Ben BrantleyNovember 24, 2014: The lines between pleasure and pain keep blurring in Kneehigh Theater’s ecstasy-drunk Tristan & Yseult, which opened on Monday night at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. This is true not only for the doomed-to-love title characters, who notoriously have that whole Eros and Thanatos thing going, but also for the audience in their thrall. Long stretches of Emma Rice’s ever-surprising adaptation of an ancient tale of fatal adultery feel like a giddy party, though one at which the guests are perhaps trying too hard to have a good time. Bring out the balloons! Raise your glasses! Sing along with the band! Then, before you know it, you’ve been ambushed by a sorrow that makes your eyes sting. And with that startling sadness comes the realization that, all along, a jagged heart has been throbbing at the center of these merry revels. You understand what one of the show’s characters, a cuckolded king who is no longer sure whether to rule with his heart or his head, means when he proclaims, “Let ambivalence come.” It isn’t just your usual waffling, shuffling ambivalence that’s at work here, though. As was demonstrated in another Kneehigh hymn to the transporting and ruinous nature of love, its stage version of the movie Brief Encounter, this Cornwall-based British company does nothing by halves, even when it’s dealing with division.
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