"The Killing Stops Here": Unmaking the Myths of Troy in the Wooster Group / RSC Troilus & Cressida (2012)

I had anticipated that last summer's collaborative production of Troilus & Cressida by New York's Wooster Group (playing the Trojans) and the Royal Shakespeare Company (playing the Greeks) at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon would fail to approximate that meeting of striving, transgressive modernism and composed, balanced classicism envisioned by the American poet Hart Crane in his famous early twentieth-century poem, "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen." Indeed, I thought it would amount to a provocative clash of irreconcilable styles at best, a car wreck at worst. I did not anticipate that it would prompt a sustained reckoning with the question: what is a Shakespeare performance a performance of?

For the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) side of the production, there was no question that, however reconceptualized to meet modern standards of irony and sophistication, a Shakespeare performance should at once comprise a state-of-the-art rendition and museum-quality recitation of the established Shakespeare script, spoken in the plummy tones and rhythms we have come to expect from the world's leading Shakespeare repertory company. Given its imprimatur, the RSC share of the performance could be expected to reconstitute in recognizable ways, with a few notable alterations, how the play in question has been produced and reproduced by the RSC itself and other mainstream theater companies for the last twenty to thirty years or so.¹ As for the alterations, these could draw on changes in the production's immediate cultural surround, and might even play to those changes in an effort to engage the audience's attention—as the RSC half of Troilus does with its brash physicality and campy cross-dressing—but not to the extent that the play itself, most urgently, what the audience expects the play to sound, if not look, like—should get lost in translation. True to form, the RSC did the play in the way the company itself has conditioned us to see and hear it: queer to the hilt, cynical to a fault, and faultlessly spoken.

Having only recently, in its thirty-eight-year history, turned its attention to Shakespeare, the Wooster Group gave no one reason to anticipate that fidelity to anything other than its own established working premises and practices would obtain in their share of the Stratford experiment. In the past, the Group has often worked from collaboratively developed in-house "scripts" and has just as often delivered recognizable (if not exactly faithful or "straight") readings of canonical playtexts, as in its productions of Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape (1996) and The Emperor Jones (1993, 2006). But lately, the Group has devoted itself to variably deferential and parodic "emulations" of prior theatrical or dance performances, such as its emulation of Richard Burton's 1964 "electronovision" Hamlet.² It has also developed mash-up productions that collide one or other playtext with material drawn from B-movies or other forms of popular culture such as its 1999 House/Lights, which crossed Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights with the 1964 cult film Olga's House of Shame, or the 2009 staging of Francesco Cavalli's 1641 opera, La Didone, with a little-known 1965 film about extraterrestrial body snatchers. These productions effectively dislocate both parties to the mash-up, alienating them from their source or site of origin, while allowing them to draw renewed interest and energy from the force and resourcefulness of their collision. And they almost always include the sophisticated deployment of new media technology.

The Wooster Group deployed similar means and pursued similar ends in its half of the Troilus production but did so, first, by altering its established practice of engaging in a sustained mash-up of canonical and noncanonical "texts" in favor of speaking the one in the style of the other; second, by taking their emulative cues not from the playtext they were performing but from footage of the films they were displaying; and, third, by failing to collaborate in a sustained or coherent manner with the partnered RSC, thereby...