You can’t go wrong when Emma Rice is involved. This was extremely clear when she introduced her early, if not first, adaptation for the stage, a touching, happily giddy spin on Brief Encounter, the beloved 1945 film adapted from Noel Coward’s one-act play Still Life and directed for the screen by David lean.
And there you have Emma Rice’s frequent approach: having fun, while usually being simultaneously serious and maybe silly with an already known source, building on it as artistic director of her own Emma Rice Company.
What’s she up to now with tongue firmly in cheek and sometimes cheeky about it, sometimes chic-y, and sometimes checkered? She’s engaged herself with the hardly unfamiliar myth of Tristan and Isolde, also identified as Yseult, hence Tristan & Yseult, here presented as The Original Kneehigh/Emma Rice Production—a return to her initial 2003 wrangle with it.
In a program note she writes that “when the story landed in my lap [she doesn’t recall how it landed there], I wasn’t sure. Tristan & Yseult? I couldn’t pronounce it, let alone understand it.”
Never mind. When you’ve clocked enough Emma Ride to get her prevailing gist, the statement comes across as quintessential. Apparently, a story catches her eye, ear, and imagination at which point all she needs is the inkling that she can do something with it that affords her an entertaining time and, as a result, has the capacity to entertain others, which undeniably this enterprise does.
Okay, here for delectation is the old Tristan and Isolde/Yseult/Iseult tale. How old? The assumed date is 12th-century England evidently, and it probably isn’t a bad bet that it has been altered over the centuries but retains the basic story about the unfortunate love—it could be said the star-crossed love—of the titular characters.
Tristan is dispatched by King Mark of Cornwall to bring him Yseult for marriage, but before he can return with the prospective bride, matters go awry. The travelers come upon a love potion. When they drink, they fall in love with each other—oh, and the woe that follows, including various well-meaning and ill-meaning characters, shouldn’t, as they hoary saying goes, happen to a dog. Certainly not to the enamored and ultimately ill-fated Tristan and Yseult.
From start to finish, Rice keeps all the venerable plot points but at the same time feels blithely free to insert innumerable additions and distraction on a two-tier set with a high-placed runway, an upstage central pole on which a round platform can be raised and lowered, and ropes that can also be used to hoist characters wantonly. (Bill Miller’s is set and costume designer, his strong contributions enhanced by Simon Baker’s suggestive sound and Malcolm Rippeth’s intriguing shadowy lighting.)
Rice doesn’t wait long to clue the audience into her attitude—in lockstep with the myth—toward love. Almost immediately, a group of the major actors, here named The Love Spotters, deliver a version of the recently-enough chart-topper, Nazareth’s “Love Hurts.” Assigning the intense ditty to those chief players indicates the universality of love’s occasionally violently wounding ways.
At times, Rice does show the entrancing possibilities of love. Tristan (John Leader) and Yseult (Nandi Bhebhe) spend amorous time with each other—much of the proceedings narrated by Tristan-bedazzled and jealous Whitehands (Stephanie Hockley). On one occasion King Mark (Edward Rowe) thinks he’s sleeping with Yseult, but his bedmate is conniving Brangian (Tom Fox, doubling as villainous Morholt) causing more difficulties
Yes, the Tristan & Yseult interplay is convoluted, much of it accompanied by a troupe of clownish figures that mix and mingle and foster the wild delight and defeat. Unavoidably, defeat takes over with, as the myth has it, the unfortunate finale action. Much of that revolves around a boat supposedly arriving to bond the lovers—white for good, black for bad—”Noir ou Blanc,” as Tristran refers to it several times. Readers are free to guess the outcome at the doleful blackout.
Under Rice’s direction and choreography, the cast supplies every complicated attitude, among them Leader, Bhebhe, Rowe, Fox and Matthew Churcher as ubiquitous troublemaker Frocin. He’s definitely worth keeping an eye on throughout.
Perhaps it’s needless to say that Tristan and Yseult/Isolde will instantly bring many, if not most, attendees thoughts of Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde and its most memorable and increasingly irresistible building liebestod music—liebestod for love and death, insisting that the two are inextricably linked.
There should be no surprise that Rice uses snatches of it a few times along her determined way. Then, for her final sequence, she presents it through to its truly breath-taking, all but unbearable climax. It’s tempting to submit that patrons who can take or leave her Tristan & Yseult at that enrapturing moment might want to consider consulting a confidant.
Tristan & Yseult opened November 1, 2026, at St. Ann’s Warehouse and runs through November 22. Tickets and information: stannswarehouse.org
