Tragedy and Metatheatre, Media Archaeology and Spectatorship in Pasolini’s and the Wooster Group’s Visions of Shakespeare

The essay discusses Othello and Troilus and Cressida as they are respectively envisioned in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poetic short film Che cosa sono le nuvole? (1968) and the Wooster Group’s multimedia theatre production of Troilus and Cressida (2012). Italy in the late 1960s, but also the singularity of Pasolini’s gaze on literature and culture, are the background to the film version; the daring joint project of the Wooster Group and the Royal Shakespeare Company – who prepared for the show separately and only met at a later moment in the rehearsal process – is the important space of creation for the second production. In their different ways, the two productions take one medium into the other and involve cinema, theatre, puppet theatre, redefining the sense of the tragic in the articulation between the human and the inhuman. In both productions spectatorship is interpellated and performed and puppets are a key feature. The essay discusses the contact (literal or otherwise) between audience and play, and offers a reflection on the sense of tragedy emerging from the two productions’ metatheatrical stance and envisionings of spectatorship and acting, and of the human and the inhuman.