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Members of the influential New York ensemble explain what prompted them finally to tackle the bard for the first time - and why Richard Burton's 1964 version was an inspiration
Before Punchdrunk, or Complicite, or Forced Entertainment, or any other experimental theatre company you can name, there was New York's Wooster Group, an avant-garde ensemble legendary not just for the work it has made since the 1970s, but also for the love affairs and betrayals that have coloured its history. As former member Willem Dafoe has put it: "You become accomplices in life. There's a terrific power in that. The other side is, there's no place to run."
Since 1974 the company has worked out of the Performing Garage in Soho – a Manhattan neighbourhood once characterised by derelict lofts and heroin dealers and now given over to Prada boutiques and cupcake-centric cafes. This year they're bringing one of their most successful shows ever – a remixed Hamlet devised from a filmed 1964 production starring Richard Burton – to the Edinburgh festival.
I meet company members Scott Shepherd and Kate Valk in the big empty black box of their theatre and, seated on the steps of the auditorium, Shepherd explains that he directed the play years ago as a student at Brown University. Ever since, he says, he's had it stuck in his head. That's not, it turns out, a figure of speech. "He has a photographic memory," Valk explains, mock-wearily. "It's kind of obnoxious at times."
The skill is what enabled him, for example, to memorise all 49,000 words of The Great Gatsby for Elevator Repair Service's acclaimed stage adaptation, Gatz. Hamlet though, was rooted even deeper. Eventually, with speeches still running through his head, it began to feel "like something that needed to be exorcised".
And so he persuaded Valk, who claims to have suffered from what she calls "Shakespeare deficit disorder", to join him in after-hours work on the text. From that moment in 2006, very slowly, their production began to take shape.
It began with the two of them, but the woman who continues to hold the company together – the matriarch, you might say – is the quietly formidable 69-year-old Elizabeth LeCompte. The Wooster Group emerged amid the creative ferment of 70s downtown New York, but it was her relationship with Spalding Gray, the late actor and writer, that dynamised the company. After graduating from Skidmore College she got together with Gray – as well as Valk, Jim Clayburgh, Ron Vawter, Peyton Smith and Dafoe – with whom she went on to have a son and a 27-year relationship. Dafoe ended it abruptly in 2004, the same year Gray took his own life by throwing himself from the Staten Island ferry. Miraculously, she weathered it with the company intact.
Before she met Gray in the mid 60s, LeCompte had little interest in theatre and had studied art, thinking she might become an architect like her father. "I think maybe," she says, "it was just a mistake – I got together with Spalding not because I thought I was going to get involved with theatre but when Richard Schechner [the group's original artistic director] hired me, I realised that it was really a good place."
By 1975 she was staging Gray's famous Rhode Island Trilogy, an autobiographical work that details his childhood and the suicide of his mother through monologue as well as personal materials such as letters and photographs. In 1980, Schechner left, LeCompte became artistic director and they changed their name from the Performing Group to the Wooster Group. What drove them then, I ask. She inhales. "It's hard to know … I don't know whether it was just youth, because it wasn't exactly idealism. We weren't afraid of anybody. We had a certain kind of feeling of the world was ours, so we could do what we wanted."
The company seems to retain that sense of boundlessness, I suggest.
"You really don't really know where you're going to end up when you start," she agrees. "And there's something very exhilarating about that, but it's also very difficult. In most theatres the director has to know what's there so the other people involved can rely on her. I don't afford anyone that comfort. I'm as confused as everybody else a lot of the time."
When LeCompte began working on Hamlet, "I didn't really think I was working on Shakespeare, I thought I was working out on figuring out about Shakespeare. I kind of came in a side door." That's often the best way. "Well," she says drily, "it's the only way I can do most things."
She remembered seeing the Burton production, which was directed by John Gielgud – himself a famous Hamlet – and thinking of it as experimental purely because the actor playing Gertrude wore not a bodiced dress and ruff, but a mink coat. "That's what experimental was then!" she laughs. More exciting though was Burton's futuristically named "Electronovision", an innovation that used 17 cameras to film and broadcast the performance for two days in 1,000 cinemas across the US (and thus an impressive precursor of cinema broadcasts like National Theatre Live). In the Wooster production, that grainy 1964 film is projected above the set, forming a ghostly backdrop of a past Hamlet. The New York Times described the Woosters' show as "an aching tribute to the ephemerality of greatness in theatre".
"The whole metaphor to using the film is the ghost," Kate Valk enthuses. "The ghost of all those performances!"
Scott Shepherd is a performer who invariably attracts adjectives like "indefatigable" and "tireless"; those seem entirely deserved when it emerges that he edited the entire Burton film into Shakespearean meter, in other words, painstakingly cutting the performers' pauses so that the iambic pentameter is duly honoured with beats and stresses in the right places.
"This was an arduous task, yeah," he admits. "To go in and cut pauses if they came in the middle of a verse line and then move them to the end of the verse line."
It's Shepherd-as-Hamlet's imagination, so the premise goes, that creates the onstage action, in which live performers mirror the movements and speech of the actors in the 1964 projection. For all the visual innovations though, LeCompte insists that the text itself remains sacrosanct, and, "on a par with the visual".
She says: "What I was doing, I realised, was trying to take this shard of what I could get from the past, from that production, and to reinterpolate it into something that made sense to me, in the future." A brief pause, then: "But I just wanted to delight myself, frankly!"
Despite three decades of making work this is the first Shakespeare the company has ever done. (They've since added Troilus and Cressida, a collaboration with the RSC, to their repertoire.)
"I was not hip to the Shakespeare idea at all," says Ari Fliakos, who plays Claudius and Marcellus, among other roles. Why? "I don't know," he says, "maybe it comes out of my allergy to theatre."
Professing not to be a "theatre person" seems to be a common Wooster trait. Even Valk, who's been described as "the Meryl Streep of downtown", has claimed that acting is not among her skills.
When I mention this tendency to LeCompte she laughs. "I like theatre people!" she protests. "But the process of making theatre in the commercial world I don't like because it's too formulaic. I really like to ramble for quite a while," – and then she corrects herself: "I don't like to, I haveto. I wish I was faster, frankly – we'd be making a little more money."
Like most members, LeCompte included, Fliakos came to the group through a side door, after hanging around there in 1996, answering phones and fetching coffee. "Everything was stimulating, everything resonated," he recalls. "It seemed like experimenting with drugs all over again, it was a whole new experience I wouldn't have expected in any kind of live performance." He sighs: "The minute you try to describe it, not unlike a trip, it begins to dissipate."
Every member I talk to about the Wooster Group speaks with this kind of ecstatic devotion. Nonetheless, the creative world of 2013 is a very different one to 1974 – financially and ideologically. LeCompte admits that, "in order to be able to keep the company together I have to be more aware of money, ways of living and ideas. It's the terrible thing that it's not hip anymore to not have money, or to be on the outside. It's much harder for people to give up things that have money and status."
But there are gains, Shepherd explains: "Most people who are in acting are going from one job to the next, and it's quite hard to develop a sense of continuity, that you're engaged in building a body of work. And here that's all you do. One piece bleeds into the other so you're creating sort of an oeuvre and making something larger than a particular production, you know? This is about developing a philosophy of working, a way of working with a group of people."
"It feels," he says finally, "substantial."
• Hamlet is at Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum Theatre 10-13 August
Clik here to view.
