Incremental plane strain deformations superimposed upon a uniformly stressed and deformed nonlinear elastic (compressible) body are treated by developing ad hoc boundary integral equations that, discretized, lead to a novel boundary element technique. The approach is a generalization to compressible elasticity of results obtained by Brun, Capuani, and Bigoni (2003. Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. 192, 2461-2479), and is based oil a Green's function here obtained through the plane-wave expansion method. New expressions for Green's tractions are determined, where singular terms are solved in closed form, a feature permitting the development of a optimized numerical code. An application of the presented formulation, namely, bifurcation of a compressible Mooney-Rivlin rectangular block, highlights the strengths of the approach.