Katie Mitchell

Beautiful Illogical Acts

Benjamin Fowler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351622431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Regia e produzione teatrale

Katie Mitchell: Beautiful Illogical Acts offers the first comprehensive study of Britain's most internationally recognised, influential, and controversial theatre director. It examines Mitchell's innovations in fourth-wall realism, opera, and Live Cinema across major British and European institutions, bringing three decades of practice vividly to life.

Informed by first-hand rehearsal observations and in-depth conversations with the director and her collaborators, Fowler investigates the intense and immersive qualities of Mitchell's distinctive theatrical realism and challenges mainstream narratives about realism as a defunct or inherently conservative genre. He explores Mitchell's theatre—and its often polarised reception—to question familiar assumptions governing contemporary performance criticism, including common binaries that pit realism against radical experimentation, auteurs against texts, feminists against Naturalism, and Britain against Europe. By examining a career trajectory that intersects with huge cultural change, Fowler places Mitchell at the centre of urgent contemporary debates about cultural transformation and its genuinely inclusive potential.

This is an essential book for those interested in Katie Mitchell, British theatre, directing, the transformative power of realism and feminism in contemporary theatre practice, and challenges to hierarchical distributions of power inside the mainstream.

Part I

Staging classics in the British mainstream (1989–2011)

Foundations I

Keywords: radical, polarising, realism, Naturalism (naturalism), auteur, directors’ theatre, logocentrism, phallogocentrism

Mitchell’s work gets under people’s skin. A notorious example: the press night for The Seagull in 2006 at the National Theatre (NT). The critic Dominic Cavendish (2006b) heard ‘groans in the stalls within minutes of the start’, attributing the ‘violent fury’ surrounding him to the sight of Konstantin (Ben Whishaw) scuttling around onstage with a microphone as he prepared for act 1’s avant-garde play-within-the-play. This was one among many ‘flagrant anachronisms’—including ‘strange outbreaks of tango dancing’—that angered critics, as evident in reviews (ibid). Although tonally consistent with Mitchell’s earlier naturalistic work, the production departed from her habitually strict historicism by combining objects and clothing from the 1890s with twentieth-century elements (including microphones, plastic raincoats and electric lighting) as a way of ‘refreshing the visual landscape’ (Mitchell 2006). This complimented a textual renovation undertaken by Mitchell’s collaborator Martin Crimp in a new lean and angular English version seeking more direct ways to address contemporary spectators than the British Chekhovian tradition normally allowed. Yet in 2006, a stinging and apparently monolithic critical aversion to work that (sometimes literally) tangoed creatively with its source text dominated reactions. Charges of directorial arrogance went unchallenged in an era before alternative platforms like Twitter (which launched in July, weeks after The Seagull opened). In fact, critical hostility seemed to mirror public opinion; one NT patron scrawled ‘Rubbish’ in marker pen across each page of the programme and posted it to the director, an analogue aggression Mitchell (qtd. in Trueman 2016) described ten years later as an ‘awful memory’ that made her apprehensive about returning to the London stage after time away in Europe.

This story has become legend. As time passes, the interpretation of Mitchell’s Seagull as a directorial miscalculation is reinforced with every re-telling. However, careful study of the reaction to Mitchell’s work on Chekhov up to that point reveals more complexity than the normal narrative suggests. Although Michael Billington (2006) seemed to speak for a range of commentators when he admonished in his two-star review that ‘you ignore Chekhov’s instructions at your peril’, accusing Mitchell of substituting mise-en-scène for meaning, his review both mischaracterised Mitchell’s intent and revealed that, in their responses to The Seagull, critics began penalising Mitchell for following procedures they had hitherto rewarded with lavish praise. Up until Three Sisters in 2003 (also on the NT’s Lyttelton stage), many judged the creative decisions stemming from her rigorous textual explorations to make Chekhov resonate with a new intensity; watching The Seagull, they took them as evidence of a newly transgressive ‘itching urge to interfere with Chekhov’ (de Jongh 2006). Complicating matters further are the reviewers who perceived continuity with past successes. Cavendish (2006a)—and he was not alone—acknowledged the production’s anachronisms but argued that it confirmed Mitchell’s status as ‘one of the most insightful Chekhov interpreters of her generation’, showing how even when a consensus builds around a Mitchell production it still provokes dissenting views. More significantly, individual reviewers are inconsistent in their readings. Susannah Clapp (2006), who like Cavendish praised Mitchell’s Seagull for ‘get[ting] into the dark corners of Chekhov’s trickiest play’, admitted that previously she had found identical techniques ‘obtrusive’ and ‘mechanically applied’ by Mitchell to texts they had failed to serve. Disorientating for readers seeking clean interpretations of a production’s meaning or the director’s methods, such protean critical positions don’t signal run-of-the-mill disagreements between spectators with opposing views. Instead, they suggest that Mitchell was developing forms of realism all along that challenged common expectations in British theatre surrounding naturalism’s role in bringing a written play to life. Did Mitchell’s Seagull sabotage or illuminate a classic? Why did so many disagree, and disagree so forcefully? Although Mitchell (qtd. in Lavender 2008: 23) analysed the hostile backlash herself and concluded, as did Cavendish, that anachronism was to blame, deeper forces motivated that backlash than an aversion to missing corsets.

Those forces are the topic of the three Foundations supporting each section of this book. They investigate the controversies Mitchell’s work provokes to establish the theoretical co-ordinates of my arguments, framing the chapters that follow by revealing links between key disputes (which in separate ways all revolve around questions of realism) and the book’s main claims about Mitchell’s political significance. The extensive reach of her work—which given its formal experimentation crosses disciplinary as well as national borders—generates a huge amount of data. From British theatre critics pursuing anti-auteur crusades to scholars theorising post-human cyborg theatre (examined in Foundations II), many commentators have been engaged by the different facets of Mitchell’s oeuvre. Their intense reactions throw simple terms into flux, revealing the ideological subtexts of the aesthetic theories they draw on and develop, all of which have a stake in controversies over representation and the real.

In this sense, and in contrast to standard approaches that elucidate performance theory with appropriate case studies, I am using an individual practitioner as a catalyst for questions about theory. The debates Mitchell inspires present an opportunity to interrogate how different theoretical stances on performance interrelate and contradict. Mitchell’s work jostles established notions. It presses on debates about terms, their cultural baggage, and their social and ideological import. It conveys the sense of boundaries being transgressed, which—in the more biting critiques levelled against it—people term violations that need correcting rather than a politicised objective worth aspiring to (as is the fashion in work beyond the mainstream). Rather than an unfortunate by-product, these disruptive qualities offer ways of generating new perspectives when tracked and surveyed. Examining Mitchell’s reception thus puts theoretical flesh on the bones of my claims in the introduction about the feminist politics and the realist commitments underpinning her theatre. Before fully animating those claims in the production analyses centred in my six main chapters, I explore the internal contradictions of key binaries that Mitchell’s work forces to the surface. These demonstrate the complexity of her political and critical impact, showing how she intervenes in long-standing disputes about realism, naturalism, feminism, directors’ theatre, quality, and feeling in the UK, Europe, and North America. Mitchell’s vexed reception, when instrumentalised in this way, reveals the deconstructive possibilities of a twenty-first-century dramatic theatre that takes reality seriously.

The radically polarising director

To set the stage for this discussion, let me bring in two other pervasive and tenacious keywords—‘radical’ and ‘polarising’—that function as first impressions of Mitchell for newcomers to her work, at least since2006 when she began attracting these labels in journalism and reviews. Mitchell’s Seagull was the first major cause, triggering critics by disrupting their habituated attachments to conventions of museum-like Naturalism—conventions that Mitchell’s previous work had confronted much more gently. By banning asides, cutting monologues and updating dialogue familiar from standard English translations, Mitchell and Crimp sought to enable a more adventurous realism closely related to the Russian original but modernised to captivate contemporary audiences. In his book surveying post-war British theatre published one year later, Billington (2007: 405) summarised the reaction as follows: ‘Opinions were sharply polarised about Mitchell’s Seagull. Some saw it as a radical stripping away of Chekhovian clichés: others as a self-indulgent piece of director’s theatre’.

As we will see, this antinomy between a writer’s and a director’s theatre often influences reactions to Mitchell’s work and fuels her ‘polarising’ credentials. The belief that her direction damages or obstructs the writer’s text took deeper root the following year in reviews of Woman of Troy, Mitchell’s modern staging of Euripides’ Trojan Women that dispensed with the gods and situated the action in an ultra-realist industrial warehouse on the edge of a contemporary war zone (see Edwardes 2007; Wolf 2007). ‘Radical’ and ‘polarising’ have framed discussions of Mitchell’s work in reviews, interviews and profiles ever since, including Griselda Murray Brown’s (2014) introduction to Mitchell as ‘the polarising director of the British stage. Best known for her radical takes on Euripides and Chekhov’ (see also Jones 2008; Taylor 2008; Allfree 2011). Since The Seagull, one of the most pervasive tensions in Mitchell’s reception grows from the sense that the director’s unusually vigorous pursuit of stage realism undermines the respectful execution of the playwright’s words. This is regardless of whether those words are already mediated by versions or translations and, ironically, felt most intensely around canonical naturalist texts that themselves seeded stage realism as a genre.

The chief question raised by portraits of Mitchell as a radical, polarising director is what the term ‘radical’—so easily and sometimes carelessly deployed in discussions of theatre—actually signifies. Critics hostile to The Seagull harnessed the negative connotations of the word’s association with extremism, fortified in the 2000s by the so-called War on Terror. Being ‘radicalised’ describes processes of ideological indoctrination that foster violent and destructive acts. Martin Kettle’s (2006) widely cited Guardian article describing directors as ‘over-indulged meddlers’ who take playwrights ‘hostage’ applied this sense directly to Mitchell and Crimp’s Seagull, indicating one of the dominant uses of radical in mainstream British theatre criticism. Especially when it describes contemporary directors, the term is a synonym not for deconstructions of texts that productively question fundamental assumptions but for aggressive acts motivated by absolutist approaches. Understood thus, a ‘radical’ approach is an anti-approach (anti-text, anti-theatre) launching an attack on the security and safety of the (playwright’s) dramatic tradition. It most frequently indicates drastic cutting and re-shaping of theatre classics—what Dominic Maxwell (2011) called Mitchell’s ‘radical rejigs’—characterised as reckless vandalism or, on occasion, as rejuvenating surgery that might prolong the life of those texts in the theatre, a view argued mainly by Lyn Gardner (2012).

Let me offer another view, drawing on the term’s etymology (Latin: radix, ‘root’), that associates radical with a return to origins or first principles in order to generate alternative perspectives from those that time hardens into orthodoxies. Disputes about a term’s meaning often rely on structuring binaries (e.g. naturalism/realism; directors’ theatre/playwrights’ theatre), with contradictory uses of a term stemming from disagreements that develop over time regarding which binaries govern and what term in each binary is preferential. The radicalism of Mitchell’s work lies in its ability to unsettle binary thinking in ways that return us to basic questions. In this respect, its polarising effects are central to its radicalism, not just separating audiences into opposing groups but working transitively to accentuate divisions within groups and exposing the contradictions and untested ideological assumptions shot through a vast range of positions. Even when ploughing the most ‘conventional’ theatrical furrows (as Mitchell’s Seagull attests), her fourth-wall realism can prove as controversial as her more obviously experimental projects. Across its varied forms, then, Mitchell’s work challenges existing critical habits, revealing in the process serious inadequacies in the binaries according to which contemporary drama, theatre, and performance is habitually policed.

Realism vs. naturalism

In her book on directing, Mitchell (2009: 50) argued that—despite having quite distinct definitions in artistic fields like painting—‘realism’ and ‘naturalism’ are interchangeable terms in discussions of Western European theatre practice. Both summon pictures of what remains a dominant genre of performance (at least in British mainstream institutions): spectators assemble to watch actors pretending to be characters navigating a series of events and social relations (which add up to a story) inside clearly delineated fictional circumstances. These procedures create the illusion of physically (and sometimes historically) remote people and places, relying on labour (backstage and onstage) that aims to supplant the here-and-now in the theatre with the ‘reality’ of this illusion, enabling spectators to suspend their disbelief by dampening awareness of the present-tense theatrical situation (e.g. by darkening the auditorium). Such a bald summary seems equally apt for the historical movement known as Naturalism, which emerged across Europe in the late nineteenth century and for which Émile Zola’s 1881 essay ‘Naturalism in the Theatre’ served as manifesto, codifying a realist approach to theatrical representation with newfound precision. As Christopher Innes and Maria Shevtsova (2013: 49) noted, it is no coincidence that the orchestration of elements made requisite by Zola’s manifesto—‘setting and lighting, costuming, moves and gestures all corresponding to evoke a facsimile of everyday life’—coincided with the director’s rise as the co-ordinating agent in European theatre practice. Naturalism and directing grew up together.

And yet, responses to Mitchell’s Seagull complicate even the most obvious terms. The production was at once too realistic and not naturalistic enough. Some critics were annoyed by Mitchell’s interest in lifelike detail—the ‘scuttling’ preparations for Konstantin’s play, or frequent interruptions by serving staff crossing the stage—which for them overburdened Chekhov’s naturalism: hence Kettle (2006) criticised Mitchell’s ‘hyperactive direction’ and the ‘gratuitous interpolations’ of actors adding words where their improvised activity implied them (the production started with a workman asking Konstantin for instructions, rather than Masha’s famous first line). Simultaneously, the production’s visual anachronisms seemed to frustrate the socio-historical specificity prerequisite to Naturalism. Despite the intense realism of the stage action, a bricolage of anachronistic visual signifiers threw Kettle, for one, into the early twentieth-century Russia of the Soviet revolution: a problem, he insisted, because the forensic precision of Naturalism’s signature texts requires that contemporary practitioners ‘stay historically disciplined’. Chekhovian Naturalism was thus besieged by a two-pronged attack. On one front, Mitchell’s realist fidelity overwhelmed Chekhov’s delicate orchestration of elements; on the other, her heavy-handed artistry (the unusual combinations of costume and props; her use of techniques like slow motion or expressive soundscores) violated Naturalism’s terms and conditions, principally its pledge to adhere to unities of time and place so as to suppress the audience’s consciousness of theatrical mediation.

Where are we now with these terms? Are naturalism and realism interchangeable, as Mitchell attests, or are they opposed, as Seagull’s critics imply? To what extent do they denote aesthetic styles, to what extent ideologies? Or should we only use Naturalism in its capitalised form as a pro...