The Wooster Group have
always been interested in exploring the ghost in the machine. Ever
since the New York-based avant-garde pioneers came stepping out of a
1960s counter-cultural underground high on cut-ups and multi-media,
they have consistently redefined what theatre can be in the
post-modern age. The Wooster Group's theatre us a theatre of
research, in which documentation and research are vital tools,
especially if tackling a 'classic' play.
More than a quarter of
a century on from their first Edinburgh International appearance, The
Wooster Group are prrsenting a production of Shakespeare's Hamlet
which was first done in New York in 2007. As you might expect from
the company, LeCompte's take on the play is different from any
reverent, heritage industry approach to the bard which UK
theatre-makers might doff their caps to.
“I hadn't thought to
do the play,” LeCompte says, “but Scott Shepherd, who plays
Hamlet, had been doing the play as a one-man show for years
occasionally around New York. I think he wanted to do it with The
Wooster Group, and he and Kate [Valk, long-standing Wooster Group
member, who plays both Gertrude and Ophelia in the production] got a
bunch of people together to work on as a reading. They invited me to
come over, and I got hooked there on a couple of things. I got hooked
on this ghost. I mean, how do you do that? I got hooked on Gertrude
as well, and we started looking at a lot of films, and I got into
the history of the play, and watching whatever recordings we could
find.”
LeCompte also got to
thinking about a performance of Hamlet she saw in the 1960s, which
was a near legendary production directed by John Gielgud, which
featured Richard Burton in the play's title role. With Burton at the
height of his film star fame, the production was filmed from
seventeen different camera angles using what was hailed as a new form
known as Theatrofilm, which utilised something called
Electronovision. The film was then shown over just two days in some
two thousand cinemas across America, and remains little seen since
then.
Despite the gloriously
retro notions of Theatrofilm and Electronovision, the 1964 film can
be seen as a precursor of the sorts of screenings major theatre and
opera companies do with hot ticket productions, The Wooster Group are
reversing the trend by having live actors onstage mimicking what's
happening onscreen while allowing their own personalities to pour
through. The result, as the film is at moments fast-forwarded, is an
audacious remix for the twenty-first century.
“I got intrigued by
recalling what I had seen,” LeCompte says, “and by remembering it
and trying to recreate it in some way. Recreate isn't really the
right word, but it wasn't about trying to reimagine it either,
because I wanted it to be there, like a ghost. So I attached myself
to the film because it was a full performance, and then asked Scott
and Kate and the others, none of whom had seen it, to watch it and
just do it. After that, we got deeper into this thing about how, if
in the year 3000 or 2050, if someone came down from Mars and wanted
to see an artifact of our civilisation, how do we figure out how it
was performed? So we used that as an idea, to pretend that we didn't
know how it was performed.
At the same time, Scott
didn't like the way it was performed and Richard Burton's
interpetration. Burton was doing it without stressing the end of the
line, so Scott edited it, and it eventually beca,e what it is now.”
These are techniques
LeCompte has been exploring since The Wooster Group's early days.
In their first visit to
Edinburgh in 1986 with LSD Just The High Points (rather coyly billed
by Edinburgh International Festival as The Road To Immortality Part
Two), for instance, a company featuring Willem Defoe and a young
Steve Buscemi in the cast, presented four very different sections to
their play. One of these reconstructed what happened when the company
left the camera running after dropping acid in the rehearsal room.
Another presented a deranged courtroom drama that looked like a manic
take on Arthur Miller's play, The Crucible. Miller had refused The
Wooster Group the rights to his play, so they wrote their own. Their
take on mass hysteria was a frenetic affair, punctuated occasionally
by klaxon noises that moved the cast speedily on to the next scene in
a way that lent it a filmic, jump-cut effect in much the same way as
is the case in Hamlet.
“It's developed a
lot,” LeCompte says, “and we've gradually found out a way of
working and using the things that we do that works.”
Long term Wooster Group
watchers can chart the company's development through a quartet if
videos culled from the company's extensive archive, and screened by
New Media Scotland as part of the EIF programme.
While The Wooster Group
are regarded of the grand-parents of the theatrical cut-up, melding
different pop cultural influences together, the last few years has
seen a new breed of American theatre-makers who have picked up the
Wooster Group's baton and run with it enough to help create an
avant-garde new wave. Most notable of these id The T.E.A.M. (Theatre
of the Emerging American Moment), who use literature and film to
explore more explicitly political concerns than The Wooster Group do,
even as they are recognisable descendants. This is something that
LeCompte gets positively clucky about.
“I see it all the
time,” says LeCompte. “It never occurred to me in my wildest
imagination that there would be a whole new theatre that say things
differently. They've all taken different little pieces of what we
worked on originally, and they're doing things that are radically
different, but with the same ideas at the core. I think it's pretty
great. It makes me very happy, and I never thought I really cared,
but I do care when I see someone taking something that we explored
and making it something that I can't recognise, something new. That's
the most exciting thing. I do see people who are just straight
copying without bringing anything to it, and that makes me fee really
sad, but there are plenty of people who are reinventing it, and
that's really nice.”
Hamlet, Royal Lyceum
Theatre, August 10th-13th, 7.30pm.
www.eif.co.uk/hamlet
The Herald, August 8th 2013
ends
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