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Tristan and Yseult

Reviewed by Deborah Klugman

South Coast Repertory

Through Feb. 22.

One element that’s always appealed to me in the Tristan and Iseult story is how King Mark – a betrayed ruler and cuckolded husband –  declines to violently avenge himself on the erring lovers.  Although the opportunity is there, he forbears from plunging a dagger into their sleeping bodies; instead he stays his hand, for he realizes he still loves both of them: his beautiful wife and her paramour, who is also his gallant courtier and kinsman.  Mark’s love is greater than his jealousy or hate, which is a very civilized sentiment for a primitive myth (as well as for violent contemporary America).

That scene, where Mark (Mike Shepherd) tosses away the knife, comes in Act 2 of this wildly revisionist telling by the Cornwall-based Kneehigh Theatre. It’s followed not much further down the line by the story’s tragic climax, in which Yseult (Hannah Vassallo) arrives too late to rescue the mortally wounded Tristan (Dominic Marsh).  This is a grand crescendo of a moment, in a production otherwise more given to clowning than catharsis.

Directed by Emma Rice, with a script by Carl Grose and Anna Maria Murphy, the story unfolds on a shadowy circular stage, its fitful events observed by a crew of “lovespotters,” who wear spectacles and dark jackets and hoods, as if dressed for inclement weather. To one side beams a pink neon sign that reads “Club of the Unloved” (surely a club each and every one of us has belonged to now and then). The club houses the versatile band of musicians whose music – a juxtaposition of multiple genres, interspersed with occasional Wagnerian passages – is woven into the story.

It helps to be familiar with that story beforehand, since its particulars are often eclipsed by the antic albeit well-executed stagecraft, a lot of which takes place around a pulley that suspends the various performers in the air, chiefly (but not exclusively) the lovers as they celebrate their ecstasy.

There are other unanticipated riffs and images: The war between Cornwall and Ireland that precedes the development of the adulterous triangle is carried out by brutal men in black seemingly plucked from a modern British gangster movie. The maidservant who accompanies Yseult and who stands in for the adulterous Queen on her wedding night, is portrayed by a man (Niall Ashdown).   Ashdown’s Brangian isn’t some glamorous modern cross-dresser either, but a gawky frump who appears to have ambled in from some old Monty Python flick.

That the character is ungainly and unattractive doesn’t detract from her pathos as one of the “unloved,” whose virtue has been unthinkingly  sacrificed for her more privileged mistress’s cause.

But here’s the thing: Despite some memorable moments – Brangian’s monologue to the audience being one of them – and Rice’s creative staging, I left the theater mostly unaffected  by what I’d seen.  It may be that sitting in the next to the last row, where I could not see the performers’ faces, affected my response, and left me cold to both their joy and their pain.  Or it may simply be that in spite of its many worthy elements, the chicanery on stage too thoroughly obscured for me the production’s poignant message.

South Coast Repertory, South Coast Plaza, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa; Sun., Tues.-Wed. 7:30 p.m.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat.-Sun. 2:30 p.m.; through February 22 (714) 708-5555, https://www.scr.org