APRIL 2003

The Wooster Group's To You, The Birdie! (Racine's Phèdre )
Hugh Denard, University of Warwick

Historians are cultural gatekeepers, watching over the traffic between past and present, checking papers … perhaps even doing a bit of black market smuggling on the side. Reflecting upon, fashioning, refracting transmissions in the flux of a culture's conversations with itself, and its memories of itself (dark mutterings in the corner). History is a struggle for control of memory on a cultural level.

The Wooster Group's version of Phèdre undertakes a kind of cultural work not far removed from these history-forming processes: it remembers Paul Schmidt's version of Racine, written for the Group. And it is a version: it's a post-Euripidean, pre-Racinian, quasi-Senecan Phèdre . Schmidt dramatically reduces the length of speeches; removes whole scenes and significant story elements such as the absolute ban by Racine's Theseus upon intercourse with Aricia; and deflates Racine's Alexandrines to a hard surface of vernacular American . Schmidt is in good company: Racine's play is itself (among other things) a version of Euripides' first (lost) Hippolytus, (later reworked as the surviving play of 428 B.C.E), both of which re-member a prior and contemporaneous mythical tradition. Lurking somewhere between Euripides and Racine is Seneca, whose Phaedra removes Hippolytus from centre stage. So multi-perspectivalism is built into this history: there is no definitive 'source' or 'original', and each 'classic' is necessarily a betrayal of its (also 'classic') predecessors.

Through these chains of successive appropriations, the canonical work and its reincarnations act as a kind of culturally-shared memory. Well, perhaps that claim is wearing a little thin: the battle to wrest the sceptre from Dead White European Male (DWEM) has long been raging. The 'integrity' of the classical canon in which Racine and his fellows reign supreme has increasingly been denied tenure (fired, you might say, or at least forced to take job-share) by educational institutions across the 'developed' world. Nevertheless, Racine's Phèdre is one of those works that has somehow retained its iconic status, and its 'memory function', within a relatively wide cultural constituency, not least through the attentions of contemporary artists such as the Wooster Group, or Sarah Kane in Phaedra's Love, or Tony Harrison in Phaedra Britannica . Even those who, like Kane, appear to espouse radical or resistant approaches to the 'classic' text can not prevent themselves from adding to its cultural presence.

Memory, of course, is critical to our capacity to constitute ourselves as subjects in the world. As Bernard Knox reminds us, the future is invisible, so we walk (or stumble) into it backwards, all the while gazing at where we have been. Strange as it may seem, then, self-fashioning, whether on a personal or cultural level, can only ever be a retrospective activity: even the imagination must operate in the past tense.

So it is no coincidence, perhaps, that one of the most 'forward-looking', ground-breaking artistic ensembles, The Wooster Group, is also one obsessed with return, repetition, recycling . Director, Elizabeth LeCompte, preserves from her years in Richard Schechner's Performance Group a method of working which centres on the miscellaneous baggage—material and immaterial—that the company brings to the time and place of devising. Among this debris are the 'found objects' of dramatic texts such as T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party , Thornton Wilder's Our Town , Arthur Miller's The Crucible , Gertrude Stein's Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights , Flaubert's La Tentation de Saint Antoine , Chekhov's Three Sisters and, most recently, Racine's Phèdre , albeit refracted through Paul Schmidt's version. These are juxtaposed with other starkly contrasting 'texts' (disco music, a Pigmeat Markham comedy routine, film clips…), each text jolting the other into a state of critical strangeness.

In the Wooster Group's productions, the presence of canonical works both signifies and performs the presence of 'the past' on stage. As complex iterants and embodiments of cultural memory, these canonical works offer structures in relation to which a culture can improvise itself into the future. What makes the Wooster Group's rendering of Phèdre particularly important in respect to this 'past-future' axis is that it is not merely the result of retrospect (as are we all), but that it performs this strange process of imagining the future in the past tense reflexively and self-referentially by strongly and self-consciously foregrounding, or putting in inverted commas, adaptation as such . (When asked to clarify some part of the story, for example, a character comments wryly: 'Ah I've forgotten it; I learnt it so long ago.' These onstage presences know , and show that they know, that they are mythical creatures.) That is not to say that To You, The Birdie is 'about' adaptation; but insofar as the production recalls or draws attention to its own process, it both includes the adaptation process and reiterates it.

* * * * *

Many of the signs of the 'postmodern' or 'postdramatic' discussed by Freddy Decreus are visible in To You, The Birdie . In particular, his identification of 'a conflict between text and stage, which makes the text act as a strange and disturbing element, out of place, causing alienation and disintegration' could be a shorthand for the central textual strategy of this production.

Supported by a single classical column base, the stage is host to a battery of sliding plexi-glass screens, a badminton net, large ornamental palms, and a constantly changing array of seats and receptacles – props for this strangely cold production of defecation and asphyxiation, enemas and colonic irrigation. Overhead, monitors, visible only to the cast, play video tracks, some pre-recorded, some mixed live by a video-artist, providing a ceaseless barrage of stimuli which the cast use to influence the energy, pace and character of their performances.

One actor speaks all of the roles into a microphone in a more or less expressionless voice (falsetto for Phèdre), from a part of the performance area designated somewhere between 'onstage' and 'offstage' – at once a visible, audible element within the mise-en-scène , and distanced from the main 'playing' area – cf. Brecht's Antigone (Chur, 1948). The voice is relayed to speakers with a 1.5-second time-lapse; the highly emotive performances of the other actors in the foreground are 'animated' by this seemingly disembodied voice.

This is not quite the same thing as deconstructing language (although the dispassionate delivery certainly challenges the status of language as a transparent bearer of meanings), nor does the body usurp the 'traditional rights' of text. Rather, the text is made simultaneously present and absent, forced into an oblique relationship with physical performance. Alternatively, one might read it as a throwback to the performance conventions of Greek and Roman drama, by rendering both voice and body as 'masks'. The technologically-mediated voice seems as immune to the extreme emotional currents that it expresses as the ancient mask.  The bodies too, mask-like, become surfaces through which the voice is articulated.  The politics of time are implicated in these cunning refractions of body and voice: the masked voice and the masked body each articulate an order of 'truth' that transcends the other.  They gesture towards something that can not be fully captured by either, or even (because the verbal and kinaesthetic systems, while temporally coinciding, emotionally 'contradict' each other) by the combination of both. 

The production's title, To You, The Birdie , refers to the courtesy notice a badminton player serves her / his opponent before serving the birdie (shuttlecock). The dominant metaphor of the production is, indeed, a game of badminton, played out in the mode of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, under the virtual surveillance of the goddess-umpire, via a periodically ascending and descending video monitor (a latter-day reinstatement into Racine's play of Euripides' deus ex machina , perhaps). Meanwhile, computer-generated sound effects associate the actions of the performers with those of characters in a Nintendo game ('as flies to wanton boys…').

The formalities of badminton offer an ironic gesture, perhaps, towards Racine's censorious, but voyeuristic, aestheticization of the sordidness and the banality of incest within the proprieties of XVII-century French neo-classical drama. The Wooster Group does not allow the modern audience to escape the implications of this parallel so easily: in the naked and near-naked bodies of various members of the cast, the production, too, subjects its audience to a guilty voyeurism, requiring that it confront its own proprieties and experience its own (in)capacity for resistance. The opening exchange between Theramenes and Hippolytus, seated on a downstage bench, is partly mediated by video screens showing us on screen what the screens physically obscure: the casual appearance and disappearance of the actors' genitals beneath their kilts as they massage their feet and engage in locker room chat. Centre-stage from the opening moments, the wrinkled scrota perform an effective, if reductive, debunking of the play's anticipated high-flown rhetoric of desire. But the scene also invites the audience to aestheticize its own 'improper' voyeurism, by becoming connoisseurs of the actors' technical execution of the synchronisation of their acting with the pre-recorded video.

* * * * *

The game of badminton is another metaphor for adaptation, of course: the adaptation process is one of sending messages back and forth between past and present, each competing for influence in and over one another. But what is at stake in this game? Are there also dangers here? If we return to the metaphor of memory, doesn't memory also have the potential to become a weapon or a trap, locking us into patterns or habits of understanding and response that have outlived their restorative and regenerative capacity? When we remember this classic play, when we smuggle it across the border, what kind of bad dreams, what dangerous cargo, does it bring with it?

Racine's play is, itself, a memory of a Jansenist world-dream, in which desire, guilt, and irrationality stack up against purity, innocence, and honour. Euripides' bull from the sea reappears in the XVII-century court of Louis XIV as the horrific embodiment of the 'unnatural' passions of Phèdre and the living corpse, Theseus. In Hippolytus' death, (hetero)sexual desire is equated with a loss of self-mastery, for which there may be compassion, but no mercy.

And while we're in the business of remembering, what about Benjamin's famous dictum: 'there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism'? Racine's Phèdre (like its predecessors) indulges the dominant male's role as sexual predator—serial rapist and murderer—and legitimates his right to exercise absolute control over his wife and son's sexuality. It is only in this context that the play can present Phèdre's desire as 'illicit' and 'monstrous'.

At the same time, we can recognise the degree to which Racine's version perpetuates the monarchical elitism, the aristocratic bias, of the ancient Euripidean play without the democratic civic consciousness or Festival of Dionysos of the 5th century B.C.E to frame it. As a shared memory-structure for a contemporary audience, therefore, the classic offers a potentially problematic means of self-definition.

In the Wooster Group's treatment, the sexual politics of Racine's play are, in some way, negotiated: in the juxtaposition of Theseus' close, domineering physical encounters with Hippolytus, Phèdre and the servant women, we are allowed to see Theseus' sexual control of his wife and son as only slightly more subtle manifestations of his general sexual rapaciousness. This challenges the Racinian play's formulation of sexual parameters, while retaining its 'plot'. On the question of elitism, in Phèdre's degradation of the servant women, and the foulness of Oenone's death (drowning in a bowl of enema-products, tied in ropes, weighted by a rock), To You, the Birdie foregrounds the implicit barbarism of the classic text's pro-monarchical bias.

The self-conscious performativity of To You, The Birdie renders visible both the (invoked image of the) canonical work and the Wooster Group's own agency in making creative associations between 'past' and 'present' in order to produce this implied socio-sexual critique.  That enables the dialectic of assimilation and differentiation between the classic play and contemporary needs and desires, if not to attain synthesis, at least to achieve clearer definition.

Preliminary Conclusions

To return to the segregation of voice and body, by displaying the voice-actor upstage, reading from the 'canonical' work, the production renders 'Time', 'Translation' and 'Mediation' as such visible.  This creates a multi-layered temporal, as well as spatial, performative, ventriloquism, in which one of the voices competing for inclusion is that difficult, insistent, held-at-bay, voice of 'the classic'.  This ghost-voice is conjured into, and allowed to act upon, the present.  The theatrical self-consciousness with which it is summoned visibly mediates its agency (a dramatic touch of difference, so to speak).  By keeping the agency of this ghostly revenant bounded by the circle of the text-artefact, the production is able to perform its trans-temporal magic without paying a Faustian price: through imaginative intervention, the myth of return is made present, and its force as an allowed agent with the present explored.  What distinguishes To You, The Birdie! , and what enables it to control the systems of cultural reproduction in which it is implicated, is thus that the presence of 'the past' is circumscribed by, rather than circumscribes, the production's politics of adaptation.

In The Wooster Group 's adaptation, therefore, 'past' and 'present' reveal each other to be constructs, each seeking authorisation by claiming to 'interpret' the other in some privileged way. But the critical component of the particular negotiation that To You, The Birdie enacts is the self-consciousness of its iteration of the classic: the impacts of past classic and present performance, and of 'the past' and 'the present' upon each other are made visible. The game of adaptation is 'rhetoricized'. Adaptation, in this dispensation, enables us to see the Self as Other, and the Classic as Other. On a broader level of cultural dialogue, it enables past and present to interpenetrate each other as alien bodies.

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RELATED LINKS

Wooster Group web-pages for To You, The Birdie! : http://www.thewoostergroup.org/twg/projects/birdie/index.html (last accessed 6/09/2007)

Istanbul International Theatre Festival Istanbul International Theatre Festival. Although the Phaedra 2002 information has been removed from the site, details can probably be supplied through the contact at the Festival Site: http://www.iksv.org/english/ (last accessed 6/09/2007)