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I hope that you all made it to this introductory warm up to Wagner's version in Perth in November 2006, by the Kneehigh Theatre Company B at the Seymour Centre, 11January. According to the Sydney Festival program, “ Charged with naughtiness, wit and tender observation, this energetic and anarchic production brings Cornwall 's oldest love story crashing into the 21st century.
The production had already received a very positive response in London at the Cottesloe in the National Theatre. In his review of 18 April 2005, Paul Taylor wrote: “
Imagine that an emotionally wrenching Greek tragedy had somehow got rudely entangled with one of those irreverent satyr plays that used to round off and put in a wider perspective those tragic trilogies in Athens…This will give you some idea of the strange, mind-bending and heart-twisting atmosphere generated by Tristan & Yseult - a wonderful retelling of the famous, not to say infamous, love story…. The result is one of the best evenings in theatre you could hope to find.”
“…the show wrests the myth back from the near-monopolistic might of Wagner and shows it to us from other competing perspectives. History, they say, is written by the victors. But here it's the defeated who get to tell the story - in which, of course, there is agony and ecstasy for our title pair, and just agony for everyone else who enjoyed the dubious privilege of being in the line of fire.
“Because of the surrounding irreverence (the absurd flying round on pulleyed ropes, the ship sail as theatre curtain, etc), the pain of their love communicates itself keenly to us. Terrific, for those who long for theatre which takes the mind and heart into an altered state.” I can only agree enthusiastically.
I found that a number of things about Wagner's opera making more sense as this version, that seems to stick more closely to the original sources than Wagner's, unfurled across the stage. The terror of the invasion of Cornwall by Morholt that leads to his death at Tristan's hand was brought chillingly to life, while also serving as a satire on the USA 's invasions of Arabic countries. During the invasion, flyers rained down on the audience saying: “People of Kernow Don't be Alarmed We come as friends and LIBERATORS Stay off the streets. REMEMBER ANY resistance is FATAL”.
However, in addition to the joys of the production, Kneehigh's approach to developing and presenting the work rang bells – Wagnerian bells. Here's how the company described its developmental process in the program: “Kneehigh started as a company making works for children and their families, but we soon found ourselves creating challenging, accessible and anarchic theatre for a diverse local and national audience. We are based in a collection of barns on the south Cornish coast.
“…Kneehigh builds a team for each project. The isolation of the barns, and the need to cook and keep warm provides a real and natural focus for our flights of imagination. This is not a conceit; it is a radical choice that informs all aspects of our work.
“Kneehigh is an ever-changing ensemble, a kind of strange family, many of whom come from, or have chosen to live in, Cornwall
“The company changes for each project – there are those who have worked together for a long time and those who have just arrived. We look to surprise each other, to take leaps in the dark but there is no given formula for making the work. If we were to have a manifesto it might include words like generosity, passion, bravery, humility, ambition, instinct and irreverence.”
It was a small shock of recognition to recollect that Wagner had posited such a communal approach to making art in Oper und Drama in 1850-51. He rhetorically sets the scene: “ Who, then, will be the Artist of the Future? Without a doubt, the Poet. (38) [196] But who will be the Poet? Indisputably the Performer (39) (Darsteller). Yet who, again, will be the Performer? Necessarily the Fellowship of all the Artists.-” and then describes a process very similar to Kneehigh's.
“The first and truest fount of Art reveals itself in the impulse that urges from Life into the work of art; for it is the impulse to bring the unconscious, instinctive principle of Life to understanding (verständniss) and acknowledgment as Necessity. (40) But the impulse toward agreement (verständigung) presupposes commonality… Therefore, only from a life in common, can proceed the impulse toward intelligible objectification of this life by Art-work; the Community of artists alone can give it vent; and only in communion, can they content it [give it content - tw].
The free Artistic Fellowship is therefore the foundation, and the first condition, of the Art-work itself. From it proceeds the Performer, who, in his enthusiasm for this one particular hero whose nature harmonises with his own, now raises himself to the rank of Poet, of artistic Lawgiver to the fellowship; from this height, again, to descend to complete absorption in the fellowship.
The function of this lawgiver is therefore never more than periodic, and is confined to the one particular occasion which has been prompted by his individuality and thereby raised to a common 'objective' for the art of all; wherefore his rule can by no means be extended to all occasions…. Each separate member may lift himself to the exercise of this dictatorship, when he bears a definite message which so far answers to his individuality that in its proclamation he has power to raise it to a common purpose ….
However, Wagner, in keeping with his views about the significance of the Volk in maintaining true social values, had already identified the Volk as the source of real art as well.
“Thus, and thus only, must the future Artist-guild be constituted, so soon as ever it is banded by no other aim than that of the Art-work. Who, then, will be the Artist of [205] the Future? The poet? The performer? The musician? The plastician? [sculptor -tw] —Let us say it in one word: the Folk. That selfsame Folk to whom we owe the only genuine Art-work, still living even in our modern memory, however much distorted by our restorations; to whom alone we owe all Art itself “(pp.196-202 The Art-Work of the Future , 1849,Translated by William Ashton Ellis, The Wagner Library, Edition 1.0) So it is, perhaps, no surprise that Kneehigh has such close roots to its Cornish community and drew its inspiration from a range of written and folkloric sources for their version of the Tristan and Isolde story.
It may only be my imagination, but it seems that Wagner's influence is still strong in artistic circles. It is, indeed, something of a delicious irony that his theory of communal artistic endeavour has, over a century, generated a performance tradition by which a group of like-minded artists come together in Cornwall to work on the story of Tristan and Isolde/Yseult, with major indebtedness to the version Wagner completed in 1859 that has almost single-handedly constructed the concept of love by which we are conditioned through innumerable stories, films, pop songs, jingles etc every day of our lives and that Kneehigh were deconstructing with such delirious joy in their communal creation.
[ Terence Watson March 2006 emphasis added.]
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16-Apr-2006
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