FringeReview UK 2026
The Wooster Group. Nayatt School, Redux
The Wooster Group ,Nayatt School, Redux
Genre: Experimental Art, Historical, Installation Theatre, Multimedia
Venue: The Coronet Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
The Wooster Group’s Nayatt School Redux at Coronet Theatre is the kind of work that benefits from reflection. Its layers of image, sound, and language continue unfolding long after the performance itself has ended. Seen now, Nayatt School Redux feels strikingly contemporary. Long before current discussions around AI and algorithmic culture, The Wooster Group were already exposing how human behaviour becomes shaped through repetition, mediated action, cues, and controlled systems.
Review
This is a delayed review, partly because I have been very busy, but also because The Wooster Group’s Nayatt School Redux at Coronet Theatre is the kind of work that benefits from reflection. Its layers of image, sound, and language continue unfolding long after the performance itself has ended. Reviewing my post-show notes, I saw that writing about the production required a process of reconstruction. Seeing the company in London felt like a rare opportunity to encounter one of the most influential forces in contemporary experimental performance at close range. Renowned for their avant-garde, multimedia approach blending archive, technology, film, sound, and live performance, the company has profoundly influenced generations of artists and theatre-makers internationally. The last time I saw them was many years ago at Riverside Studios, and returning to their work now, it feels striking how contemporary many of their ideas have become.
Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, who originally came from an art school background, and composed collectively by the company, Nayatt School Redux unfolds through a layered interaction of objects, recordings, bodies, and signs, where storytelling gradually fractures into something more unstable and fragmented. Its visual language feels rooted as much in art practice as performance.
Part of what makes The Wooster Group feel so significant is the way their work moves between visual art performance and theatre without fully belonging to either. Emerging from the experimental culture of downtown New York in the mid-1970s before formally becoming The Wooster Group in 1980, the company developed work outside mainstream theatre structures. During the 1970s and 80s there was a similar fringe touring culture in the UK where companies such as Impact Theatre Co-operative, Forkbeard Fantasy, IOU Theatre, and Welfare State International explored ways of combining installation, visual imagery, live action, and theatre in warehouses, empty buildings, and temporary spaces outside conventional venues. Much of the growth of these companies came from a collective search for meaning and from the desire to work together as groups exploring shared values and differences through performance. I was also part of that movement through the Manchester-based Theatre Totale, later working with Welfare State International.
This matters because these companies were working against growing pressure toward marketable, controlled forms of art. As neoliberal ideas expanded through the late 1970s, 80s and 90s, experimental performance often existed outside the mainstream, resisting the controlling cultural narrative of polish, product, and commercial certainty. In that context, collective work, temporary spaces, warehouses, and unstable forms were not just practical choices; they were part of another way of thinking about art and shared meaning.
The collective nature of Nayatt School Redux is central to its effect. Ari Fliakos, Andrew Maillet, Michaela Murphy, Suzzy Roche, Scott Shepherd, Maura Tierney, Kate Valk, and Omar Zubair operate collectively, constructing the performance in real time with remarkable precision and energy. A tribute to how ‘ideas, emerge through process’.
The production begins almost as a lecture-demonstration. Archival material connected to Spalding Gray establishes the history of the work before the action unfolds. Three records become key artefacts within the piece; all connected in different ways to memory and replay. One connects to T. S. Eliot and The Cocktail Party, while another evokes horror and psychological disturbance. Alongside them sits a turntable that feels symbolic: an object of repetition, replay, and recall, continually returning the past into the present.
Parts of the original performance survive on film, while other sections are missing and must be rebuilt through new video and live action. The audience is held between archival footage, contemporary recordings, and performers reconstructing fragments of the original work in real time. Running beneath this is a quieter suggestion about human fragility itself. The production hints at the private realities people construct in states of isolation or psychological crisis, realities that can lead either toward collapse or revelation.
This connects strongly to the tension between formality and breakdown running through the piece. The restrained social codes of The Cocktail Party sit uneasily beside the presence of horror and psychological disturbance suggested elsewhere in the production. There is something almost wabi-sabi in the way the work treats fracture and repair: cracks and imperfections are not hidden but become part of the form itself. The production continually returns to fragmentation and repair, exposing the fragile structures people use to hold themselves together.
Like collage, the work assembles meaning from fragments, interruptions, and juxtaposition. Performance behaves almost like a live editing process, (time-based art) layering recordings, gestures, texts, and archival traces into shifting compositions.
The records remain some of the most powerful objects within the production. They are treated not nostalgically, but as mechanisms for storing and replaying time. One has holes drilled through it, disrupting the continuity of the groove. The crackles and interruptions become part of the meaning, reminding us that memory itself is unstable.
Form and function remain tightly connected throughout. Action unfolds around a steel workbench resembling both a laboratory table and an industrial assembly surface. Plastic cups build into temporary structures suggesting hierarchy and instability. Cables, screens, and laptops remain exposed. Even the performers are positioned almost like objects within the environment itself. The visual language shifts between installation, archive, rehearsal, and live composition.
There is also a subtle economic landscape sitting beneath the production. The world of steel surfaces, exposed cables, plastic cups, repetition, and mediated behaviour evokes something beyond theatre itself: the managed environments of contemporary neoliberal culture. Human interaction appears increasingly structured through efficiency, control, and performance. Adults replay actions once performed by children. Past performances echo through present bodies.
The age range of the performers becomes important because it grounds the work as deeply human despite its highly controlled environment. Different generations occupy the same performance space, carrying different histories and lived experiences into the same moment. This becomes particularly resonant in the reconstruction of material originally performed by children. In Nayatt School Redux, adults now replay gestures and actions once carried out by younger performers, creating a strange temporal dislocation where past and present seem to occupy the stage simultaneously. The effect is both moving and unsettling. Childhood is no longer represented directly but recalled, reconstructed, and filtered through memory. Time itself feels layered, unstable.Human presence persists, but inside increasingly controlled environments.
What gradually emerges is a sense that performance itself is being exposed as a system of codes: behavioural, visual, technological, and emotional. Meaning emerges through repetition, accumulation, and association rather than direct explanation. In this sense, the production recalls Marshall McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message.” The structures shaping the performance become inseparable from what the performance communicates.
Seen now, Nayatt School Redux feels strikingly contemporary. Long before current discussions around AI and algorithmic culture, The Wooster Group were already exposing how human behaviour becomes shaped through repetition, mediated action, cues, and controlled systems. The danger is that once behaviour is encoded into technological structures, those systems begin feeding it back to us as norms. AI does not simply reflect culture; it standardises it. Whose language becomes trusted? Whose emotions appear unstable? Whose behaviour becomes risk? In this sense, the performers appear both deeply human and subtly programmed at the same time.
The work feels deeply contemporary because it mirrors the wider systems we now inhabit. Behaviour becomes patterned, mediated, and repeatable. The performers seem caught between human spontaneity and programmed environments, executing precise repetitions while moments of vulnerability and unpredictability continue to break through. This is a kind of psychological excavation.
What makes Nayatt School Redux so compelling is that despite its formal complexity, something deeply human runs through the production: ageing, memory,damaged recordings, and the impossibility of perfectly reconstructing the past. Its brilliance lies in the precision of its form and in the extraordinary energy with which the ensemble delivers it. What could easily become a conceptual exercise instead feels alive, urgent, and fully present. The layering of archive, sound, objects, and live reconstruction is handled with such confidence that fragmentation itself becomes dynamic rather than distancing.
