There’s a special appeal in seeing old stories told in fresh ways. Call it comfort food with a twist. The British theatermaker Emma Rice, best known in the U.S. for her inventively reimagined version of Brief Encounter that lit up Broadway in 2010, has revived the 2003 that made her name. Tristan & Yseult is a genre-blending, fourth-wall-busting adaptation of the medieval legend of forbidden love that brims with energy and wit and a determination to entertain that can sometimes seem needy.
The script, written mostly in rhymed couplets by Carl Grose and Anna Maria Murphy, borrows from various versions of the story and even cues up recordings of the Richard Wagner opera. Tristan (the buff, cornrowed John Leader) is a warrior who wins favor with Cornish King Mark (Edward Rowe) and is dispatched to Ireland to find the woman whose hair was in the locket of the Irish warrior he vanquished, whom he intends to make hid bride. Tristan spots the ebullient Yseult (Nandi Bhebhe, wide-eyed and lovely), and while sailing back to Cornwall the two accidentally glug down a love potion — leading to a steamily forbidden romance that will have dire consequences for everyone.
Rice is not a director who’s interested in telling a story straight. The 12-person cast, many wearing horn-rimmed glasses and hoodies as a woeful chorus of the “unloved,” frequently break out into song, a mix of originals (by Stu Barker) as well as pop hits from artists familiar to British Gen Xers like Travis, Kate Bush, and Roy Orbison. There’s also a bit of circus work here, with players performing aerial tricks, bouncing onto the round center platform via trampoline, and exiting with a dive into a mattress pad upstage right, near the risers where the live band performs. (Bill Mitchell is credited with the original set and costume design, which has been “refreshed” by Vicki Mortimer, while Malcolm Rippeth pierces the stage with bold stripes of light.)
Leader and Bhebhe sizzle as the central couple, grooving to the choreography of Etta Murfitt that leaps from lustily intimate to juke-joint funky to music-hall polished. Matthew Churcher steals his scenes as King Mark’s ambitiously obsequious aide de camp, while Tom Fox rivets as a dowdy servant who generates both big laughs and genuine pathos when Yseult recruits her to replace her in her wedding-night bed so that King Mark will believe she’s still a virgin.
Rice’s theatrical mode is so over-the-top that you can sometimes feel the strain of the performers determined to entertain us. It’s hard to sustain this much antic mayhem over nearly two and a half hours, and you can sometimes feel the energy deflate like the balloons the audiences is asked to inflate and then release unknotted to mark the occasion of Mark and Yseault’s wedding. (In a fit of mock fury, Churcher’s Frocin amusingly runs around popping all the balloons that did get knotted by audience members who missed that instruction.)
When does charm cross the border into twee? It’s a tension that exists in many contemporary British theater imports, from The Play That Goes Wrong to Operation Mincemeat. But there’s no denying how Rice’s influence or her achievement in her breakout work. Tristan & Ysteult still holds an undeniable power because it approaches creating a theater piece by definition: It’s a play. And that sense of limitless playfulness is a source of joy. ★★★★☆
TRISTAN & YSEULT
St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn
Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through November 22 for $54 to $124