Content area
Full Text
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte and Mark Ravenhill. Wooster Group and Royal Shakespeare Company. Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK. 15 August 2012.
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.
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...