Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare (review)

Troilus and Cressida is Shakespeare's most staunchly anti-war play, full of violence, jagged edges, and unfulfilled subplots. This rough dramaturgy reflects both the lived material experience of war and the fractured experience of contemporary life, thus lending itself to the collage-based postmodern approach for which the Wooster Group is famous. In the play, the worlds of the Greeks and Trojans collide; similarly, in this production, the aesthetic of the Wooster Group collided with that of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and more specifically with the contemporary British aesthetic known as "in-yer-face theatre," most often associated with playwrights Sarah Kane, Philip Ridley, and Mark Ravenhill. Ravenhill directed members of the RSC as the Greeks, while Elizabeth LeCompte directed Wooster Group members as the Trojans. The two companies rehearsed separately in New York and Stratford-upon-Avon before coming together to create the finished production.

Ari Fliakos (Hector) holds up Troilus's armor after discovering his dead body in Troilus and Cressida. (Photo: Hugo Glendinning.)

As one might expect from such material and its fractured rehearsal process, the final production was not polished; instead, the contrasting performance styles rubbed up against each other, creating a productive friction of postcolonial intertextuality. This tension produced an unsettling quality that highlighted ongoing uncertainties about contemporary war in the current cultural moment. To this end, the Greeks performed as contemporary Anglo-American soldiers in military dress, publicly engaging in rituals of machismo while privately indulging in queer partying. Their set was composed of steel gurneys and austere silver-mirrored flats. By way of contrast, the walled city of Troy was a colorful Indian-style reservation akin to the vision of the Wild West of popular imagination. The Trojans spoke with the flat affect of Indians in spaghetti westerns. These Wooster Group Indians were not Native Americans, but postmodern stereotyped "Indians." The depiction created a sense of intertextuality: the Trojans became stereotypical ethnic "Others," akin to generic perceptions of Muslims in a culture of Islamophobia. Outfitted with neon headbands, foam armor modeled on classical statues, weapons made of lacrosse sticks, and a colorful tepee—all created by Dutch sculptor and installation artist Folkert de Jong—these absurd characters always pointed to the elaborate construction of their own theatricality. Live music was a key component of the production, and occasionally the Trojans would break out into a chorus, singing "John Wayne, hey-o, hey-o, hey-o, hey-o."

By way of explaining the decision to stage Troy as an Indian reservation, Elizabeth LeCompte referred in her program note to Philip Deloria's book Playing Indian (1998), in which he states that "whenever white Americans have confronted crises of identity, some of them have inevitably turned to Indians. What might it mean to be not-British? The revolutionaries found a compelling array of ideas in Indianness. What did it mean to be American? What did it mean to be modern? To be authentic?" (156). Just as former colonial subjects "played Indian" in the Boston Tea Party—an image that has now been appropriated by the present-day Tea Party political movement—so also did the Wooster Group members play Indian in Troilus and Cressida, calling to mind the historical settling of North America by former British subjects and the subsequent American Revolution. The show layered this colonial past with the contemporary moment insofar as the portrayal of Anglo-American soldiers by the RSC Greeks reminded audiences of contemporary barbarism in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Wooster's use of Verfremdungseffekt further pointed to cultural assumptions: for example, that the cultural otherness of the Trojan Indians was a metaphor for more general Western misconceptions of ethnic Others. For example, Pandarus, played by Greg Mehrten of Mabou Mines, developed a gestus for the stereotypical drunken Indian. Holding an electric blue bottle in his right hand, Pandarus tipped the bottle back while simultaneously also tilting his head, saying...