The Nymph Dies

grown-ups

Tristan and Isolde (Iseult) are a couple caught in a game of love and death, or rather the death of love. Although they swore to each other and tried their best not to let their relationship and therefore their lives fall into routine, that is exactly what happened to them. In order to escape the grey everyday life, they play a variety of roles, but they cannot become what the other wants and needs.

ISEULT: God wasn’t kind to us when he gave us desire.

MINSTREL (hands Tristan brush and watercolors): Shall we begin?

TRISTAN: Shall we begin?

ISEULT: Paint Ireland for me. Tristan refuses to take me there. Paint it for me.

TRISTAN: Now?

ISEULT (rises): Paint me a forest... (She takes off her gown. But instead of continuing to undress, she begins slowly, ritually to dress, putting on a skirt, then a blouse, then a cardigan.). . . Then we’ll walk hand in hand into the trees. While you’ll busy yourself with your easel and brush, I’ll be undressing in the quivering net of shadows and sun. I shall lie down on the ground. And there, white and wounded in the dead leaves, you will paint me.

(Finally she puts on her gown as well and curls up in a foetal position on top of the bed.)

TRISTAN: Iseult...?

ISEULT: And when you’ve painted me you can breathe life into the canvas, so you’ll have a new, innocent Iseult. And you can leave my body to rot with the leaves.

TRISTAN: Iseult...?

ISEULT: Why aren’t we trees? So we could shed our yellowed lives in the autumn and grow fresh ones again in the spring?

The drama was later (temporarily) titled Tristan and Isolde. A Play about Love and Death.