Halfway through Kneehigh's show, the band were playing, balloons were flying, hearts and minds were connecting and I suddenly realised how rare it is to have this much fun in the theatre. This evening is like a great gulp of refreshing sea air. It made me want to gurgle with delight.
Kneehigh approach this great Cornish love story in a characteristically crab-like manner: the point of view of the unloved, the unchosen, history's forgotten bystanders. Central to it are not the lovers themselves - although their tale of shipwrecked hearts is told with a giddy feet-off-the-ground abandon - but those who will go to their graves having never been loved.
The story is narrated by Whitehands, Tristan's uncherished wife. There is a wonderful chorus too of anorak-clad love twitchers who observe couples through binoculars, trying to make sense of something they will never know.
This is important because what could so easily just be all hearts and flowers becomes something much tougher, far more moving. Don't get me wrong - there are times when you are simply swept away by the lush Wagnerian romanticism of it, such as when Eva Magyar's Yseult and Tristan Sturrock's Tristan entwine their bodies and their feet really do leave the ground. Their lunatic hearts are fully exposed, like bleached driftwood washed upon the shore.
But their story is layered and textured with other stories: the pain of the cuckolded King Mark (Mike Shepherd), whose granite face melts into a river of sorrow, and the terrible loss of Yseult's waiting woman Brangian, whom Craig Johnson, in expert cross-dressing mode, invests with a mixture of wide-eyed innocence and knowingness.
The production is thrillingly playful in every respect. It is childlike but never childish, full of music from a terrific band and it echoes with hoots of laughter and the whispered memory of despair. It embraces you so warmly that you feel as if you have been physically hugged. I loved it with a passion.
· Until June 7. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
