Troilus and Cressida performed by Wooster Group (review)

The World Shakespeare Festival production of Troilus and Cressida, staged at the Swan in Stratford and the Riverside Studios in London in August 2012, was a project initiated by Rupert Goold to bring together the RSC’s classical approach, rooted in language-centered concepts of character, with the “not-acting,” degree-zero characterization practice of Elizabeth LeCompte’s New York-based Wooster Group. The choice of play was in part determined by its suitability for weeks of separate rehearsals, with the RSC as the Greeks and the Woosters taking on the Trojans. After Goold withdrew to direct his first film, playwright Mark Ravenhill took over direction of what he saw as a fractured, “Cubist” work. In front of a mirrored revolving set, minimally dressed to suggest a battlefield hospital, the Greek commanders, equipped for desert warfare, played out traumatized, fragmented and reinvented identities via homosocial, dragged-up roleplay, fetishist body adornments, cartoon-like prosthetics, and ritualistic pastiches of military ceremonial. On the other side of the wall, Troy became a Day-Glo tepee surrounded by highway detritus, the costumes deconstructed “Native American” dress topped by Styrofoam “scalps” of classical Greek statues. The Woosters’ customary metatheatrical style thus expressed itself in a game of “playing Indian,” purportedly enacting a nostalgic “American” history of pale-faced dressing-up in the identities of the colonized or oppressed, with sound and movement actually inspired by film of Canadian Inuit people. The overall approach was reminiscent of their previous controversial use of blackface, but also dramatized their avowed sense of subaltern theatrical status in relation to English “mastery” of Shakespearean language.

Hyped as a must-see contest of acting styles at the heart of the Cultural Olympiad, in the eyes of many reviewers and audience members the resulting encounter between New York avant-garde experimentation and RSC classiness, like the play’s pastiche of Homeric warfare, resulted only in boredom and bathos. Others, myself included, found the production both mesmerizing and strangely moving. The negative response, expressed in audience walkouts and hostile online commentary as well as acerbic or bemused newspaper reviews, centered on three aspects of the production: its lack of clear narrative, the Woosters’ handling of Shakespeare’s language, and the absence of clearly delineated characters to engage audience empathy. At the Swan the production followed the 1609 quarto in having no Prologue, but at the Riverside the Prologue was present and delivered by the RSC stage manager, its invitation to “Like or find fault; do, as your pleasures are” (line 30) simultaneously cueing the audience into the production’s style and ruefully acknowledging its lukewarm Stratford reception. Drawing on my viewing of the production in Stratford, in London, and on film, I want briefly to explore how much the perceived presence or absence of emotionally realist acting might help to explain this divided audience reaction, and to consider how far the production’s realist filmic intertexts complicate its apparently deconstructive interpretation of Shakespeare’s satire.

The genealogy of emotional realism is most often traced to a “System” of techniques derived from Stanislavsky, which seek to create a familiar, or at least recognizable, social world on stage, out of which developed a “Method” focused on the use...