Nottingham Playhouse

"Tales of Tristan and Yseult go back hundreds of years, initially in the oral tradition and then written down, set to music, and adapted as relevant from one generation to the next. Kneehigh Theatre’s version rightly extends on this and catapults us bang up to date. The starting point of a love story with a feisty female, her sultry lover and her regal husband is widened to incorporate the gay lover, the love of the faithful servant, family love, the desperate love of the second wife and, most importantly, the state of the unloved. There’s something for everyone in the audience here.

The overall impression is one of pace, zip, relevance, ‘in your face’ impact. The music is loud and lively. The action is stunningly physical – are we in a theatre or a circus? Dance and timing are central to the action and plot. All this is laced with wonderful, zany humour. And the main theme of the importance and relevance of love in our lives is imparted with seriousness and sensitivity.

Doesn’t it look good too! Eva Magyar, as Yseult, is the model of Marilyn Munro (excepting her red locks) with bags of sex appeal and acting ability. She’s a very talented lady. Tristan Sturrock, as Tristan, can play it languid or wild, while Mike Shepherd gives King Mark a gangster-like quality, with or without the shades. He is a founder member of the Kneehigh Theatre, based in Cornwall, with its remit to create challenging, accessible and anarchic theatre for diverse local and national audiences. Over the past 25 years it has built itself up quite a reputation and mostly works in conjunction with other theatres. This time the partners are the National Theatre and the Bristol Old Vic, the play having been initially commissioned by Nottinghamshire County Council. There’s an international tour to the Antipodes when the present tour here is completed.

Everyone deserves a mention, actors and production team alike. There is a big sense of a team – of a core rep. company, a family who work together so well and have polished the action so highly that the end product, under Emma Rice’s direction, is just perfect.

Rush to catch it at Nottingham Playhouse before it goes on to Plymouth, West Yorkshire, The Lowry and Birmingham or, if you really want an excuse for a big holiday, Sydney, Australia and Wellington, New Zealand in Spring 2006."

NOTTINGHAM EVENING POST (19-Oct-05)

"Which ever way you look at it, this is an extraordinary production from Kneehigh; no theatre-goer, serious or otherwise, should miss it.

Director Emma Rice uses a text with amazing vigour and thrust. Its frequent incorporation of rhyme somehow helps to underline the power and universality of the tragic legend.

We get a weird juxtaposition of the burlesque and erotic high tragedy-simultaneously.

It’s a show which combines elements of lounge entertainment, panto, opera, farce and much else, and makes massive demands on the performance in terms of acting, singing, musicianship, dancing and athleticism.

These demands are met by everyone, perhaps most obviously by Craig Johnson as cigar-chomping gangster-king, Morholt, who gets stabbed to death in the eye-the fights are brutal. Later playing Brangian the maid, he’s brilliantly comic as a man in drag, yet contrives to bring out all the pathos of an unloved woman.

A superb Whitehands, Amanda Lawrence, delivers deliberately anachronistic and matter of fact narration. At the climax, as a finely cast Tristan Shurrock and Eva Magyar lay dead; Wagner’s music is almost over-powering."

Alan Geary

BBC NOTTINGHAM ONLINE (19-Oct-05)

"Strange and beautiful, this play is not just a breath of fresh air, it’s a positive blast of the stuff.

Tristan and Yseult – highly unusual names in what turns out to be a highly unusual play. But trust me, this production is different in all the right ways.

This old Cornish tale, detailing the love triangle between King Mark (Mike Shepherd), his wife Yseult (Eva Magyar) and his French kinsman Tristan (the delicious Tristan Sturrock – massive thanks to whoever decided he should spend the majority of the play topless!), is given a whole new spin by director Emma Rice.

Rice instead concentrates on the Unloved, as represented by a hilarious anorak-clad bunch of trainspotters and led by Amanda Lawrence’s Whitehands, whose crystal-clear delivery and thoughtful intonation expertly capitalises on the brilliantly witty yet beautiful script.

It is this that gives a bittersweet stab to proceedings – for example Craig Johnson, as Yseult’s maid Brangian, presents a masterclass in comic timing yet makes his character oddly endearing, vulnerable and ultimately poignant, in a finely nuanced and wonderfully humane performance.

Sturrock and Maygar are the beating, throbbing and pulsating heart of the play, generating a chemistry that sets off more fireworks than we’re likely to see come Bonfire Night. At one point, thanks to some inspired pulley action, they actually dance on air – and this production does exactly that.

It’s refreshing, invigorating and uplifting – even when we reach the play’s shuddering heart-wrenching crescendo, one of the most affecting endings to a piece of theatre I have ever seen.

With some lively audience participation, fabulous dancing, adrenaline-fuelled fight scenes and more balloons than your average children’s entertainer, it challenges every aspect of theatre that could be accused of being dry and staid. And, with its excellent use of space and levels and a constantly innovative set, all set to the tune of a gloriously emotive and eclectic range of music, mostly played live by the talent-drenched actors (I would have paid good money to hear their band alone), it warmly embraces all of your senses.

Overall, this makes for a night that sparkles with that special intense theatrical magic. Entirely entrancing, beautifully bewitching and spectacularly spellbinding, it’s only apt that, for a play all about love, I loved it with an absolute passion."