Katie Mitchell and the Technologies of the Realist Theatre

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Notes

1. Siobhan Davies and Katie Mitchell, ‘Conversations Around Choreography’, https://www.siobhandavies.com/conversations/mitchell/transcript.php (accessed December 10, 2019).

2. Ibid.

3. Katie Mitchell, The Director’s Craft (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 1.

4. Konstantin Stanislavsky, ed. and trans. Jean Benedetti, My Life in Art (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 257.

5. Mitchell, The Director’s Craft, 230.

6. ‘Woman Alone: Directing Opera’, Interview with Elaine Kidd, Video, https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/woman-alone-directing-opera (accessed April 23, 2019), 00:13:50, 00:14:37.

7. Mitchell, The Director’s Craft, 1.

8. Martin Heidegger, trans. William Lovatt, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1977), 13. I am grateful to Donato Wharton for numerous conversations about the technological apparatus of Mitchell’s theatre, and for suggesting Heidegger’s ideas in response to an early draft of this essay.

9. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 6.

10. Ibid., 12.

11. ‘Katie Mitchell on Theatre Directing’, 00:06:09.

12. Mitchell, The Director’s Craft, 50.

13. Ric Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 32, emphasis in original.

14. Maddy Costa with Katie Mitchell and Alice Birch, ‘Alternative Point of View: The Malady of Death’, http://blog.barbican.org.uk/2018/05/alternative-point-of-view-the-malady-of-death/ (accessed April 30, 2019).

15. ‘Woman. Alone: Directing Opera’, 00:31:37.

16. Ibid., 00:27:28.

17. Ibid., 00:31:33.

18. The interest in ‘off-stage’ spaces in these stagings and their simultaneous presentation of different spaces echoes the concerns of Ophelias Zimmer (Berlin, Schaubühne and Royal Court, 2016) and Anatomy of a Suicide (Royal Court, 2017), both of which are discussed elsewhere in this issue by Benjamin Fowler and Anna Harpin.

19. Mitchell, The Director’s Craft, 50.

20. Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre, 25.

21. Simon Shepherd, Direction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), 84–6.

22. Ibid., 198.

23. Prompt Script, National Theatre Archive, 17.

24. Mitchell, The Director’s Craft, 28.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., 38, 74.

27. Ibid., 102.

28. Ibid., 180.

29. Tom Cornford, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart (Again): Katie Mitchell directs Genet’s The Maids’, European Stages, http://europeanstages.org/2017/10/28/love-will-tear-us-apart-again-katie-mitchell-directs-genets-the-maids/?format=pdf (accessed April 30, 2019).

30. Mitchell, The Director’s Craft, 79.

31. Benjamin Fowler, ‘The Meaning of Peeling Paint (Notes on a Mitchell Mise-en-Scène)’, in this issue, 151- 67 (152).

32. Lucy Kirkwood, Plays: One (London: Nick Hern Books, 2016), ‘Introduction’.

33. ‘Stage Manager’s Cue Sheet’, held in the National Theatre Archive, indicates a five minute improvisation in the ‘DINING ROOM’ beginning ‘ONCE ALL CAST ARRIVED AT BEGINNERS’ and then ‘MOVING OFF TOWARDS LIVING ROOM’ (situated in ‘SL side dock’) before clearance was given for the performance to start. There are also notes indicating sound cues for off-stage microphones during the performance.

34. John Berger, ed. Geoff Dyer, Understanding a Photograph (London: Penguin, 2013), 90.

35. Dennis Kennedy (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), entry for ‘Box Set’. I am grateful to Gilli Bush-Bailey for a crash course in the history of the box set.

36. David Belasco, ‘Creating Atmosphere’ in Directors on Directing: A Source Book of the Modern Theater, ed. Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), 125–37 (133).

37. ‘Immersive Worlds: Designing Katie Mitchell’s Theatre’, Alex Eales in conversation with Benjamin Fowler in The Theatre of Katie Mitchell, ed. Benjamin Fowler, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 12–38 (22–3).

38. Ibid., 25.

39. David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (New York: Penguin, 2006), 13.

40. Ibid., 124.

41. Philip Steadman, Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces (Oxford University Press, 2001), 143.

42. Ibid., 157, emphasis in original.

43. Mitchell, The Director’s Craft, 79.

44. This was Mitchell’s second production of the play, which she previously directed in 1991 for the RSC.

45. Royal Opera House, ‘Lucia di Lammermoor Insight’, YouTube-Video, March 10, 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76726__eeV0 (accessed April 30, 2019), 01:03:24.

46. Ibid., 01:15:15.

47. See Tom Cornford, ‘Willful Distraction: Katie Mitchell, Auteurism and the Canon’ in The Theatre of Katie Mitchell, ed. Benjamin Fowler, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 72–92 (79).

48. Heidi Hartmann, ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union’, Capital and Class 3 (1979), 1–33 (11).

49. Coppelia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in in Shakespeare (Oakland: University of California Press, 1981), 13.

50. Sarah Kane, Interview with Dan Rebellato, November 3, 1998, transcript available at https://intranet.royalholloway.ac.uk/dramaandtheatre/documents/pdf/skane1998.pdf (accessed July 31, 2019).

51. Ibid.

52. National Theatre, ‘Katie Mitchell on Cleansed’, YouTube-Video, March 7, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LizhtwXP8A (accessed July 31, 2019), 00:05:30.

53. Leah Sidi, ‘A Director in Search of a Narrative: Reality-Testing in Katie Mitchell’s Cleansed’, Performance Research ‘On Proximity’ 22, no. 3 (2017): 49–56 (52).

54. Ibid., 54.

55. Ibid., 55, 56.

56. Christina Delgado-Garcia, ‘Subversion, Refusal, and Contingency: the Transgression of Liberal-Humanist Subjectivity and Characterization in Sarah Kane’s Cleansed, Crave, and 4.48 Psychosis’, Modern Drama 55, no. 2 (2012): 230–250 (233).

57. Katie Mitchell, ‘Director’s Note’, National Theatre Programme for A Dream Play (2005).

58. August Strindberg, adapted by Caryl Churchill, A Dream Play (London: Nick Hern Books, 2005), ‘Author’s Note’.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid.

61. Mitchell, ‘Director’s Note’.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid.

64. Katie Mitchell, ‘Doing the Impossible: Katie Mitchell in Conversation with Dan Rebellato’, in Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat, ed. Margherita Laera (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 213–26 (214).

65. Anna Harpin, Madness, Art and Society: Beyond Illness (Abingdon, Routledge, 2018), 184.

66. Ibid., 185–6.

67. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2014), 74.

68. See Cornford, ‘Willful Distraction’, 82–4.

69. Salzburg Festival, ‘The Forbidden Zone 2014ʹ, YouTube-Video, June 18, 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRzphUKspwI (accessed April 30, 2019), 00:02:18, 00:01:47, 00:01:01.

70. 59 Productions, ‘Forbidden Zone – The Making of a Live Cinema Show’, Video, July 23, 2014 https://vimeo.com/101517150 (accessed April 30, 2019), 00:02:35.

71. Leo Warner, ‘Stages and Screens: Katie Mitchell’s Theatre Aesthetics, Janis Jefferies in Conversation with Leo Warner’, in The Theatre of Katie Mitchell, ed. Benjamin Fowler, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 93–120 (115).

72. Donato Wharton, Interview with the author, October 2016.

73. Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Charlotte Mandell, After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 25.

74. Ibid., 30.

75. Ibid., 31.

76. Ibid., 36.

77. Ibid.

78. Warner, ‘Stages and Screens: Katie Mitchell’s Theatre Aesthetics’, 98–9.

79. Ibid., 96.

80. Ibid., 97.

81. Ibid., 99–100.

82. Ibid., 112.

83. Ibid., 113.

84. Liz Tomlin, ‘Citational Theory in Practice: A Performance Analysis of Characterisation and Identity in Katie Mitchell’s Staging of Martin Crimp’s Texts’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 24, no. 3 (2014): 373–7 (374).

85. Warner, ‘Stages and Screens: Katie Mitchell’s Theatre Aesthetics’, 100–1.

86. Dennis Kennedy, ‘The Director, the Spectator and the Eiffel Tower’, Theatre Research International 30, no.1 (2005): 36–48 (44).

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Tom Cornford

Tom Cornford is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, and an editor of international, peer-reviewed journal Studies in Theatre and Performance. His research focuses on relationships between practices of theatre-making and contemporary politics and culture. Forthcoming publications include Theatre Studios: A Political History of Ensemble Theatre-Making (Routledge 2020).