Playing with the Wooster Group: 'a totally new way of being on stage, of dealing with signals and the material of the show'

'Your audience will love it.' That was the last thing Liz Lecompte said of the Wooster Group shortly before the premiere of Vieux Carré heard from the heirs of playwright Tennessee Williams. Since then, the trustees of this American monument's estate have been keeping quiet about the performance Lecompte created. It was the end of a long period in which the leading avant-garde company had had to negotiate every line. Biggest stumbling blocks were a few hefty art penises and overtly homoerotic scenes. According to director Lecompte, necessary ingredients: 'Williams regularly refers to the underbelly, and uses numerous imagery that is about the male member. It is also well known that Williams had a fondness for Japanese pornography. In our performance, it is fitting to make those implicit references explicit.

Tennessee Williams, known for Tramline Desire and Cat on a Hot Zinc Roof, among others, would have taken 40 years to write his penultimate play from 1978. In Vieux Carré, he describes life in a dingy boarding house in a neighbourhood that was already the drain of New Orleans was. The text shows a young writer struggling with his authorship and his coming out as a homosexual in this place full of alcoholics, transvestites, criminals and failed artists. The play is regularly performed in the United States but is not considered a highlight of the writer's oeuvre, who died in 1983. In fact, its world premiere in 1978 was a flop.

The fact that the version the Wooster Group is now bringing is a success is due to the special approach the company has taken again. After all, the company never plays straightforward. Even though every word passes the review, in accordance with the strict requirements of the Williams heirs, in design and manner of speaking the company takes great distance from the naturalism By Tennessee Williams.

The actors are in a space defined by technology: rolling stages, monitors aimed at them but not at the audience, headphones on their ears. According to actress Kate Valk, the Wooster Group thus also fulfils Williams' wishes: 'He often talks about this in the stage directions. Then he wants something to be brought very stylised, or absurdist. So he also wanted to try something different to escape naturalism.'

And that made the play ideally suited for a Wooster treatment, explains Lez Lecompte: 'Importantly, we don't like naturalism. Therefore no cottage realism in this Williams. Audiences today also deal with images in a very different way than they did 30 years ago.'

On the monitors, invisible to the audience but easily visible to the players, alternating film footage of Paul Morrissey and Ryan Trecartin. These images serve as inspiration for the actors: they set the mood, introduce movements and moods and sometimes inspire completely different scenes. At the back of the stage are the VJs who control the film clips. Lecompte: 'Paul Morrissey's films have an atmosphere that very much suits Tennessee Williams. He also knew life in The Factory, the artists' sanctuary of Pop Art-guru Andy Warhol, where Paul Morrissey worked on his films. As shocking as Morrissey's films were then, they now strike us as almost romantic. As a modern counterpoint, we added Ryan Trecartin's video art. These are very modern images, much harsher often.'

That video footage provides a special inspiration for the actors, Kate Valk explains: 'Sometimes in dialogue, you notice that your opponent just has the images of Trecartin in front of him, while you are in a Morissey.'

To complicate matters further, the players also hear very different things on their headphones than they speak. It makes you wonder whether they still get around to really playing with all those different signals. According to Kate Valk, "If you try to act nicely in such a situation, you have a problem. It's like swimming: you have to stay on top, but above all you have to be able to float. You shouldn't be distracted by all the input you get, but let it flow over you and through you. It is very inspiring: a totally new way of being on stage, of dealing with signals and the material of the performance.'

'For me, this is a very fine method for providing structure to performances,' Lecompte explains. 'Especially because I work a lot at the interface between dance and theatre. For me, it's more about the art of movement than anything else. The movement is central. Whether the action comes first, or the words, no longer matters, it is one flow. Gestures are not there to illustrate words either. They stand on their own. Nothing is complementary, everything stands on its own.'

Vieux Carré can be seen on 11, 12 and 13 June at the Zuveringshal on the Westergasfabriek site.