It's hard not to view outgoing Globe boss Emma Rice's programming through the prism of her imminent departure. But you can probably dial down the speculation when it comes to 'Tristan & Yseult', a spirited revival of a 2003 classic from her old company Kneehigh, who’ve been regular guests at the Globe throughout her truncated reign.
’Tristan & Yseult’ has a familiar air to it if you’ve seen any of Rice’s other shows for the Cornish company, and your tolerance of whimsy will need to be reasonably high. But it’s also one of the best realised, most full-blooded, of her amped up, irreverent fairytales, and it fills out the Globe absolutely gloriously.
The legend of the eponymous doomed lovers has been kicking around for the best part of a millennium, but this is emphatically the Ricean version, with the entire shebang set in a last chance saloon for the terminally single called The Club of the Unloved, populated by nerdy men in anoraks, presided over by sardonic ringleader Whitehands (Kirsty Woodward).
Here, Dominic’s punky Tristan isn’t Cornish, but a Breton who shipwrecks in Cornwall and helps its King Mark (Mike Shepherd) fight off an attack from the Irish knight Morholt (Niall Ashdown). Mark finds a locket containing a woman’s hair on the dying Morholt’s person, establishes it’s his sister Yseult, and – as one does – sends Tristan off to Ireland to capture the young woman and bring her back to be his bride. Faster than you can say ‘love triangle’, things get very complicated, as Hannah Vassallo’s wild, witchy Yseult falls for both men.
Rice’s production is infused with the giddy rush of young love, but tempered by the pragmatism of hindsight – it doesn’t end up in quite the same place as the legend. It is funny and irreverent and filled with song (and balloons), but it is also passionate and tender in the most unexpected places – the scene in which Yseult’s virgin maid Branigan, played by a male actor (Ashdown again) takes her mistress’s place on her wedding night to Mark could seem like vaguely homophobic panto, but is instead disarmingly earnest and sweet.
If you don’t like Kneehigh’s whole *thing* this won’t convert you: the second half is fey as you like, with a chunk of it taken up by a singalong of Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’, while the famous black sails/white sails thing from the myth is only nodded to in a way that verges on baffling. But if you’re into them, this is the good stuff – pure, giddy, sardonic, swooningly romantic.