Tristan and Isolde by Martin Shaw (review)

Abstract

Storytelling, Self, Society, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2020), pp. 138–142. Copyright © 2020 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201 P E R F O R M A N C E R E V I E W Review of Tristan and Isolde, Performed by Martin Shaw, February 1, 2020, The Gatehouse, Dartington Hall, Totnes, UK Joseph Sobol M artin Shaw is one of the foremost exponents in the United Kingdom of what might be called the archetypal activist school of contemporary storytelling . This school (in the artistic, not the institutional sense) is distinguished by loosely discursive performances with spontaneous associative commentary, projecting narrative imagery through the prism of Jungian, Campbellian, or gender -political interpretive frames. Often, interpretive counterpoint is drawn from the audience as well as the performer/leader, so that events become collaborative social-psychological explorations. As Shaw declared late in this seven-hour marathon journey through the foundational myth of European romantic love, “The stories are alive, and where they live is inside of you.” The setting for this event was a chapel-like gatehouse on the grounds of Dartington Hall, formerly the site of Dartington College of Art. Dartington, fittingly, was a medieval demesne that in the 1920s came into the possession of a wealthy Bloomsbury denizen and his American heiress wife who turned it into a center of progressive agriculture and arts education. From the late 1960s, it housed the renowned Dartington College of Arts, a countercultural hub for post­ theatrical Sobol n 139 performance art. After the transfer of the Dartington College programs to Falmouth University in 2010, the facility has endeavored to reinvent itself as a community arts center, with a mixture of adult education, crafts instruction, natural foods café and family park, along with a couple of free-standing graduate courses administered by Plymouth University. The setting of an event forms part of its subtextual framing, infusing the atmospherics and blending with the peripheries of the performances themselves—so the green swell of the Devon landscape and the excellent organic café on the rise above the gatehouse became portals into and out of this visualization of the Tristan myth. Shaw’s portrayal of the hero as a puer aeternus, far more at home in hopeless pursuit than in satisfied desire, resonated with my own memories of a disorderly hitchhiking visit to Dartington College forty years before, in the depths of my own puer miseries. The eighty-five-seat hall was nearly full by the 10:00 a.m. start time. Shaw began with a leisurely introduction tracking his own relationship with the story and the various texts through which it has been handed down to us, in particular the monumental version of Gottfried von Strassburg, dated approximately 1210. He traced the poetics of the troubadours and trobairitz, the lesser-known female court poets of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and touched on their animating philosophy of courtly love and the political, economic, and cultural conditions that circumscribed it. In a milieu where marriages were mainly alliances arranged between ruling powers, Shaw suggested, the outlets for romantic love these poets would have had were primarily adulterous. He suggested that this historical metanarrative infused the poem with a continuing significance—that it represented one of the originating imaginings of romantic and sexual agency within the Western tradition. With this hypothesis as a thematic frame, he gradually eased into the body of the story. This lengthy prologue was curiously congruent with Gottfried von Strassburg ’s own practice. Gottfried also framed his text with a prologue in which he claims his intended audience—those elect souls willing to endure ennobling sorrow for the sake of love—and indicates the scope of his research into the many sources of the tale. He thus distinguished those few who “told the tale aright” from the many who had not—with precedence given to the version by Thomas of Britain, composed at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1150s. The formal progression seemed natural here as in the old text, arising from the need, residually oral in the manuscript but immediate in performance, to prepare the ground for trust and mutual visualization to grow between teller and audience...