It may take a while to tune into the wavelength that Kneehigh Theatre's Tristan & Yseult is traversing. Heck, it took me nearly 30 minutes to decide if there even was a wavelength. But long before the end of the two-hour play having its West Coast premiere at Berkeley Rep, this retelling of the medieval legend has established a fascinating clear-channel frequency that turns the story inside out before putting it back together with a mounting emotional wallop.
Classical music-lovers know the story through Richard Wagner's opera, though its libretto is but one version of a tangled plot that has gone in numerous directions since the tragic love story gained popularity in the 12th century, including what became the Broadway musical Camelot. But however you may know the main elements, you haven't seen anything like how Tristan & Yseult is told according to Kneehigh.
UK-based Kneehigh has made two lauded visits to the Bay Area, with Brief Encounter and The Wild Bride, both wonderfully imaginative and utterly different. Tristan & Yseult adds to and amplifies on that legacy with an enormous array of theatrical styles and techniques that could at first seem arbitrarily evoked before becoming essential ingredients ingeniously employed by director/adapter Emma Rice and writers Carl Grouse and Anna Maria Murphy.
As the audience enters the theater, a singer and a four-piece combo are already performing a series of torch songs from an upstage platform. A sign tells us the venue is the Club of the Unloved, and the 1950s-styled singer (Carly Bawden), who goes on to become narrator and commentator, tells us that the members of this club long for the day that their membership expires. The passion that will engulf young lovers Tristan and Yseult �" their story is told in flashback, a tragic ending already proclaimed �" is but the stuff of dreams for the members of the Club of the Unloved, who roam forlornly about the stage.
From the happy 1950s vibe of the early moments, we are plunged into serious portents of war as the Cornish king (Mike Shepherd) prepares for battle against the invading Irish. But then it's a kind of pow-zap-bam battle as if from TV's Batman that wins the day for Cornwall, earning the king the Irish leader's sister as bounty. It's up to trusty lieutenant Tristan (Andrew Durand) to deliver Yseult (Patrycja Kujawska) to the king, which he dutifully does, but not before their own treasonous love has blossomed.
But the chanteuse-narrator, known as Whitegloves for her fashionable retro wardrobe, sighs, "Oh, Tristan, you should have seen this one coming." Throughout the production, the kind of obvious coincidences, absurdly mistaken identities, and discomfiting contrivances that audiences have learned largely to tolerate from centuries-old sagas are spotlighted and taunted. But rather than further undermining connections to modern sensibilities, they actually allow emotions to flow more freely by neutralizing these barriers.
This is never truer than after Yseult's wedding to the king, whom she knows is expecting a virgin. She convinces her maid to take her place in the bridal bed, allowing deflowering blood to flow, and then quickly changes places. Plausibility is already strained, but it would seem to reach a breaking point since Craig Johnson has played the maid to great laughs in a drag persona worthy of a Benny Hill sketch. But the laughs disappear as the maid delivers a post-coital lament of the physical love she will know this one and only time. Never mind that it's delivered by a hefty man in a negligee.
On its way to the predestined conclusion, the production includes aerial maneuvers, anarchic dancing, homages to Mr. Bean, musical underscoring ranging from Nick Cave to Yma Sumac to Bob Marley, and an audience-participation sequence that briefly turns the auditorium into a giddy children's party. We laugh, we cry, but most of all, we awe.
Tristan & Yseult will run at Berkeley Rep through Jan. 6. Tickets are $29-$99. Call (510) 647-2918 or go to berkeleyrep.org.