Admittedly, Shakespeare’s play takes place against a rather fascinating situation. For seven years, the Greeks and the Trojans have existed alongside each other, at war, but in a stalemate. Two distinct, opposing cultures, side by side. The process has, of course, mirrored that, with American experimentalists The Wooster Group composing the Trojan scenes independently of the RSC’s Greeks, directed by Mark Ravenhill, so that a famously disjointed play is honoured for its bittiness. I’ve already addressed a lot of that in a preview feature, so here I’m going to concentrate on the experience of watching the production, in particular, how the two halves marry up.
The Wooster Group play the Trojans Native Americans. Or rather as The Wooster Group playing Native Americans. The company’s mode is one of authentic inauthenticity. Once again, they have employed the inherently referential performance style, whereby actors mimic actions and sounds from cinematic representations of native Americans (and, I think, native Inuits) that are played on television screens and fed to them via headphones. Essentially, they are reproducing – and, in the process, extenuating – a received notion of another culture.
The result is consciously other and consciously approximate. They move with a different rhythm, taking tiny brisk steps, keeping a low centre of gravity and running on the spot. Elsewhere, they ape traditional dances, hopping from one foot to the other. Vocally, too, they squeeze Shakespeare’s words through an alternate register: flattening it into a generic high-pitched staccato. It’s not a million miles from an offensively shoddy ‘Ching Chong Chinaman’ accent. (Incidentally, they all blend into, well, not necessarily one, but one or two: performance mode being flatly consistent and overwhelming of any sense of individual character, not least because their behaviour is ‘alien’ first and foremost.)
There is another layer here. Folkert de Jong’s costume and set are traditionally shaped, but obviously synthetic and splashed with neon. The colours, deliberately evoking rave culture, make this a critique of manhandling a culture into an aesthetic. But there’s more: the programme notes explain that his material is Styrofoam: “a material that is fragile, pliable, lightweight and modern and which will never compose.” Meanwhile, the settlement set includes an oil barrel and a tyre. Panderus and Paris have both dropped more traditional garmets for cowboy shirts. It is, in other words, a two-way relationship; the original culture has been corroded by external influences. It’s noteworthy that they use modern lacrosse sticks as weapons, given the sport’s Native American origins. (Incidentally, basketball, which also crops up here, was started in Canada by Scottish immigrants. Also, their armour, which is fashioned out of Ancient Greek statues cast in a malleable plastic, nodding to the play’s own cultural corruption and cooption.)
The same thing has happened in the RSC’s Greek camp. The Greeks are broadly dressed in modern Desert Storm military uniforms, but these have similarly disintegrated after seven years away. Only Danny Webb’s Agamemnon remains parade-ready, albeit with a terribly British umbrella tucked under his arm. The rest are in various states of disarray, after years of accumulation and discarding: Clifford Samuel’s Patroclus is in cargo pants, string tank top and a headscarf, Joe Dixon’s Achilles wonders around in a towel and tattoos and Zubin Varla’s Thersites has taken to transvestism, a pair of plastic Gazza tits hanging off the back of his wheelchair.
All this is borne out in the cultural exchange that goes on between the two sides. Of the two Greeks in the Trojan camp, Scott Handy’s Helen resembles Elizabeth I and trills a very English ditty, while Webb’s Diomedes is a Crocodile Dundee figure (also taken from film), capable of replicating native customs with the correct fishhook-tussle greeting. Towards the end of the play, tokens are exchanged, such that Diomedes walks away with a string of knick-knacks hanging from his neck. Ajax finally chucks out his sword for a discarded tomahawk.
What you’ve got here is a portrait of two cultures rubbing up against one another; mutually exchanging and contorting and eroding each other.
However, as I say, this is the play’s situation, its world, and in foregrounding the ideas that jump out of it so heavily, the RSC and Wooster group have forgotten about – no, obliterated – the play’s narrative. That makes it criminally difficult to watch.
Basically, the RSC might as well be playing against a black hole. By speaking the text so flatly – so otherly – the Wooster Group succeed in reducing it to Morse Code. Because they so refuse to pander to the ears of their audience, they give us no help in keeping track of what’s going on; we hear words as notation, more or less another language, rather than for any sense. The intention to treat Shakespeare’s text as a foreign language might look good on paper; in practice, it’s wilfully obtuse. We get next to no sense of half the characters and half the narrative. It’s so deeply frustrating that you just give up.
As a result, the only element of the plot that really comes out clearly is the battle of reputation between Greek champions Ajax and Achilles over who should fight the Trojan champion Hector. Troilus and Cressida’s obstacle-strewn love story is swallowed, Trojan strategic debates barely register and if you see Cressida’s sacrifice to the Greeks, it’s whys and wherefores are mangled out of comprehension.
Evidently, this is part of the production’s point; setting out to demonstrate the disjointed bittiness of Shakespeare’s play, which shifts in tone and hops from subplot to subplot without really having an overarching narrative drive. It’s notable that form and process both mirror the central motif of cultural exchange by osmosis.
However, I found this just as problematic. Rather than stick to their classical-maestro guns, the RSC’s Greeks seem to have absorbed a fair whack of the Wooster’s sensibilities (Andrew Haydon has smartly pointed out that this is likely down to Ravenhill replacing Rupert Goold, who partly concocted the project before having to withdraw.) With their WWF wrestlers, olde monarchs and cinematic Aussie croc-killers, they have adopted some of the referential quality of their American collaborators, as well as some of their knowing theatrical fakery. Kelly’s Ajax wears a padded muscle suit – and yet Dixon’s Achilles bares his chest. Honestly, it just looks like they’re trying too hard; awkwardly sporting the newest trainers in the playground. It’s all a bit of a mish-mash, in contradiction with the directness of the Wooster Group’s offering. Additionally, the emphasis on queerness in the Greek scenes distorts the notion of a shifting culture, because it carries such baggage of its own. That’s not to dismiss it as uninteresting. Quite the opposite: it’s too interesting to be merely tossed into the mix.
However, I found this just as problematic. Rather than stick to their classical-maestro guns, the RSC’s Greeks seem to have absorbed a fair whack of the Wooster’s sensibilities (Andrew Haydon has smartly pointed out that this is likely down to Ravenhill replacing Rupert Goold, who partly concocted the project before having to withdraw.) With their WWF wrestlers, olde monarchs and cinematic Aussie croc-killers, they have adopted some of the referential quality of their American collaborators, as well as some of their knowing theatrical fakery. Kelly’s Ajax wears a padded muscle suit – and yet Dixon’s Achilles bares his chest. Honestly, it just looks like they’re trying too hard; awkwardly sporting the newest trainers in the playground. It’s all a bit of a mish-mash, in contradiction with the directness of the Wooster Group’s offering. Additionally, the emphasis on queerness in the Greek scenes distorts the notion of a shifting culture, because it carries such baggage of its own. That’s not to dismiss it as uninteresting. Quite the opposite: it’s too interesting to be merely tossed into the mix.
This is a production with too much going on, one that doesn’t teach you how to watch it. That the Wooster Group get the first scene means you’ve got to pick through the language, the design, the performance practice, all of which are carry some whooping great ideas, as well as the basics of the play. You’re overwhelmed from the off, in spite of the fact that most of the onstage elements that carry meaning are constant rather than shifting; so the thought process is of making sense, but this static, plastic quality is fairly unsatisfying. They are – as I say – picking apart the situation, not the play as a whole and, ultimately, Troilus and Cressida is more than two adjacent, fractious cultures rubbing off on one another.
Photographs: property of The RSC
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