Tristan and Isolde

by Richard Wagner

seen at the Coliseum on 22 June 2016

Directed by Daniel Kramer (the new Artistic Director of ENO) and conducted by Edward Gardner (the previous Musical Director), this production features Stuart Skelton as Tristan, Heidi Melton as Isolde, Matthew Rose as King Marke, Craig Colclough as Kurwenal and Karen Cargill as Brangane.

Musically this was a fine production, with excellent orchestral playing supporting a wonderful Tristan and a fine Isolde, who seemed however to lack the stamina to deliver the final Liebestod with assurance. The supporting cast also sang with great warmth, and the diction in Andrew Porter's translation was clear.

Visually, there was a contrast between the striking sets designed by Anish Kapoor and the costumes designed by Christina Cunningham which ranged from serviceable to awful with little coherence. In the first act, set on a boat, the set was an inverted segmented cone of golden walls, with Isolde and Brangane in the left segment, Tristan and Kurwenal in the right, and the central segment left almost entirely empty until Brangane prodces the love potion and, shortly afterwards, King Marke and his retainers board the ship in the very last moments of the act. This cleverly highlighted the separation of the characters which is the source of most of the dramatic tension as Isolde seeks to interview Tristan before the ship reaches Cornwall. The sense of frustrated connection, gradually revealed by Isolde's narrative about healing the young warrior 'Tantris', is mirrored by the way the two protagonists clutch at the walls separating them, apparently unaware that there is a whole section of space between them.

Their plight is further emphasised by parallel actions from their servants, who spend much of the act preparing the princess and the knight for their arrival in Cornwall. This involves dressing them in elaborate costumes which bear little relation to each other - Isolde is fitted into a ludicrously wide hoop which is then draped with cloths to look like an exaggerated 18th century gown, while Tristan is armed with samurai-like black accoutrements. This is all very well, but the eye is constantly distracted by the unnecessarily foppish costumes, wigs and servile demeanour of both Brangane and Kurwenal, who look as if they have had to be satisfied with a box of pantomime outfits influenced by the excesses of Panem in The Hunger Games.

In the second act, the servants had at least shed their high-piled grey wigs, while Tristan and Isolde were dressed far more simply for their night-time tryst. This took place in an extraordinary grotto within a huge sphere, a brilliant device for setting mood and reflecting the intense dichotomies of love, death and night, set against society, life and day, expressed in the lyrical outbursts of the lovers. Brangane's calls of warning were issued out of the surrounding darkness, but when King Marke returned the whole globe swung round to reveal its outer skin, hiding the grotto completely, while the lovers were restrained on hospital beds with great straps, barely able to touch one another. This was a disturbing picture of the world reasserting its rights, lending added force to King Marke's bewildered shock and pain at the betrayal he has suffered, and strengthening the idea that their is something deadly about the intensity of the passions shared by Tristan and Isolde.

In the third act a featureless wall is rent by a huge gash which reveals part of the grotto, and which at times seems to bleed black light into the world of Kareol where the wounded Tristan now lies. But the sombreness of the music is rather awkwardly compromised by the antics of Kurwenal, now reduced to looking like a Beckettian clown, and in fact performing many of the stage directions of the servant Clov in the opening scene of End Game. Unlike Clov, he is able to sit or lie down - he is sleeping restlessly under Tristan's bedsheet when the curtain rises - but the attempt to link Tristan's parlous state with the bleak emptiness of Beckett's world is almost gratuitous.

Both Tristan and Isolde have become white-haired in the interval between the second and third acts, though it is unclear whether this is due to the passage of time, or the trauma of separation, or the whim of an over-interpretive director. Indeed many of the visual distractions seem more like interference than insight, which is a pity, because it does detract from what is musically a very satisfying (if not absolutely overwhelming) experience.