FringeReview UK 2026

Nayatt School Redux

The Wooster Group

Genre: Adaptation, American Theater, classical, Comedic, Contemporary, Costume, Devised, Drama, Experimental, Film, Historical, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Sci-fi, Short Plays, Theatre, Tribute Show

Venue: The Coronet Theatre, Notting Hill

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Imagine a ghost: Hilton McRae (happily still alive) as Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly skipping along the Coronet stage in its 2015 production of The Cocktail Party. Then imagine it like a mirror smashed on that same stage floor, with parts of T.S. Eliot’s 1949 play sharded up and served in jagged ends and in fuzzy 1978 video. With a new voiceover by the group’s co-originator Kate Valk, as the bad video has degraded: though still audibly addressing us like the dead space captain ice-encased in the 1974 film Dark Star. If that sounds outrageous, read on. That’s part of the baroque joy of The Wooster Group’s Nayatt School Redux – who briefly infest The Coronet Theatre directed by Elizabeth LeCompte till April 25.

It’s a strange infectious privilege unfolding over 80 minutes, with that stage only latterly used. What’s mounted by LeCompte are the relics of the original stage materials, often partly lost. There’s the late-1960s pink armchair, metal frame of a tent (the tent fabric perished) like a large umbrella’s skeleton: and squared-off area (an original Perspex box has vanished). As lit by David Sexton, it all looks like an Yves Tanguy painting as realised by Marcel Duchamp, with a little bit of it destroying itself: sugar glass sheets. At least I hope they’re sugar glass: the group’s penchant for authenticity makes you tremble. And their shattering is, well, shattering. In the foreground facing and bang up to the audience, Valk and a selection of records intone imperturbably. Behind, a screen projects the original production with some living (and present) and deceased actors.

You watch as this group, founded in 1978 by the late Spalding Gray (who committed suicide in 2004) and Willem Dafoe with Valk, resurrect a moment. As Gray, Scott Shepherd re-enacts Gray’s narration of Ken Kobland’s Amsterdam 16mm taping of this 1978 production. Shepherd frames it with preludes of medical horror shows, also from the period and also projected with (at first) Valk’s laconic voiceover. The whacky costumes, realised by LeCompte and Enver Chakartash seem to invoke the originals; but you really can’t tell. They’re suitably garish.

The main event is one which originally used children in some of the Eliot play. Whilst they were instructed to shut their eyes, actors did some unspeakable things – in front of the audience – to make John Barrowman blanch. Here, in a child-free audience, these things are just narrated deadpan as an epilogue: to much nervous laughter. No-one, I suggested to one group member, might dare them even in this miraculous bastion of internationalism: the Coronet is about the only place you might imagine something sacramental and sacrilegious rubbing together at the same time.

Val and Shepherd are joined by Ari Fliakos, Andrew Maillet, Michaela Murphy, Suzzy Roche, Maura Tierney, Omar Zubair. They might be nicknamed “Dances with Ghosts” though some are dancing with colleagues they knew. Apart from Gray, we’re told Ron Vawter died from a heart attack in 1994; and Libby Howes in 2025, a survivor of psychiatric ‘treatment’, aged just 70. Indeed Howes had enacted a woman patient tortured after being assisted at a bizarre breast self-examination scene.

None of this quite explains why things happen. And by that I mean sudden eruptions of noise and screams, crafted by Eric Sluyter and (again) Omar Zubair. There’s no interpretation: here artefacts, including text, are laid and conjoined, rubbed, chafed and chamfered together in an ecstasy of distress. No-one knows why. It’s just done, when someone suggests it. What this conjures though for the audience is a disruption to the pseudo-classical surface of Eliot’s Cocktail Party, now revealed (as Michael Billington suggested in his 2015 review) as something more baroque. The play, referencing Aeschylus and Sophocles, still engrosses; with stunning coups for those who don’t know it. Though the moral outrageousness of crucifying a woman on an anthill, quite suddenly and by people in Africa, is not just an inability to imagine human consequences, it’s deeply racist. We were entering post-colonial times but the reception at the time – Eliot a living classic – was complacent.

So what the Wooster Group’s howls and screeches might suggest is like Francis Bacon’s contemporaneous treatment of Innocent X in several paintings: a man in a cage screaming, given auricular power in Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Three Screaming Popes of 1990. You’d think.

But no. There is no interpretation, the aural outrage is merely fortuitous. Yet the patina of screams can’t be disinterred from the ear. And when an image of a woman suddenly deliquescing into a skeleton is held up, whatever the Group’s protests, I don’t quite buy it as non-interpretation, even as spectacle. Someone was outraged, perhaps despite themselves. Though this resort to (ex)plosive noise also depends on the selection of material (elsewhere more congenial to schlock on this showing): in which case it could easily function as a go-to soundtrack. It hardly matters.

The visual is fractured, residual (all those curated fragments), reproduced by what’s conjured as a broken-down museum, recalling a heyday which never came. The actors reprise or (if not there in person) re-enact their forebears. Almost holy theatre. I’m reminded of Mark Fisher’s 2016 The Weird and the Eerie. The ‘weird’ is the intrusion of what does not belong into the familiar: like H. P. Lovecraft or  H.G. Wells, Fisher suggests; as traditional models. The ‘eerie’ tends to establish itself in a landscape mostly emptied of the human, as in Picnic on Hanging Rock. There the human trace is liminal and vanishing.

There’s elements of both but here it’s certainly the Wooster Group intruding like some Lovecraftian Cthulhu with a sense of humour. Again, this intervention might well be unpremeditated, even more spontaneous than flesh-absorbing monsters for instance. As Lovecraft’s protagonist of The Call of the Cthulhu says: “there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.” That’s pretty much the soundtrack we get, a little more localised. It hadn’t struck me even as I began writing this.

With the U.S. emphasis on naturalism – far more than in the U.K. let alone Europe – the Wooster Group stands out. It’s about as different to those absorbing real-time playwrights Richard Nelson, Annie Baker, (and to a degree) Amy Herzog and others as you could imagine. Its critics might hold it up as a curated relic with a time-limit bounded by the active survival of its originators. Anyone else might feel this is one of the most extraordinary survivals of radical theatre in the culturally normative U.S. One which re-enacts its classics, playfully and wittily – there’s gales of laughter at both levels of origin and reprise. And one too which allows freedom looking slant at the shattered mirrors on the floor.

Maillet declared later he’d “only” been with the group, on and off, for ten years. That suggests not only the long immersion of the originators but the faintly awed approach of newcomers.  It’s as unheard of in the US as it is in the UK for a repertory company such as this to survive more or less intact for 50 years. It’s also about timing. The Wooster Group were luckily able to buy their premises in a rare non-profit moment in late 70s New York. In a Marxian sense, they own the means of production, occupation and survival.

There’s moments in the early-middle where my attention drifted, but from halfway onwards I was gripped as the Eliot deconstructed itself, like a flaking penance for its sins.

The end, announced by Valk, is typically throw-away: laconic yet faintly valedictory. What else will The Wooster Group re-enact, or start from scratch? They seem tethered to their roots, and their ghosts. Perhaps they’re hungry, mineral ghosts; perhaps demons. Ones who laugh outrageously through the static. Whatever they are, you hope they haunt forever.

Directed by: Elizabeth LeCompte
Composed by: The Company
Performers: Ari Fliakos, Andrew Maillet, Michaela Murphy, Suzzy Roche, Scott Shepherd, Maura Tierney, Kate Valk, Omar Zubair
Sound & Original Music: Eric Sluyter & Omar Zubair
Lighting: David Sexton
Set: Elizabeth LeCompte
Original Video and 16mm Nayatt School film: Ken Kobland
Additional Video: Wladimiro Woyno, Irfan Brkovic, Andrew Maillet, Yudam Hyung Seok Jeon
Assistant Director: Michaela Murphy
Costumes: Elizabeth LeCompte & Enver Chakartash
Dramaturg: Matthew Dipple

Published April 23, 2026 by Simon Jenner