Listening to a Pinter double bill: Mitchell’s direction of Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes at the Royal Court Theatre

ABSTRACT

The double bill of Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes at the Royal Court Theatre in June-July 2001 has proven to be a kind of its own in the history of productions of Pinter’s plays for the stage. What I attempt to do in this essay is to recapture the double bill by analysing a monophonic and unedited sound-only recording of the performance of Mountain Language on 2 July 2001 and that of the performance of Ashes to Ashes on the same date, both archived in the British Library. I will show 1) how sounds in the performances of the two plays related to one another; and 2) how significant Katie Mitchell’s direction of both plays and Gareth Fry’s sound design for the double bill were at the crossroads of Pinter, performance, and sound.

KEYWORDS:

• Harold Pinter
• Katie Mitchell
• sound
• performance
• recording

Acknowledgements

For their help, I am grateful to the staff in Sound at the British Library. I thank the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In his The Royal Court Theatre and the Modern Stage, Philip Roberts writes, “The modern British theatre was to look to modern continental European theatre for its contemporary masters, Beckett and [Bertolt] Brecht. The catholicity that has marked the [Royal] Court during its years was implicit in its beginning phase [the 1950s]. The mix, when it developed, placed the British theatre in the mainstream avant-garde of Europe” (1999, 57).

2. A sketch called The New World Order had opened at the Royal Court Theatre in 1991 (Billington 2007, 327–28).

3. In all subsequent parenthetical references to the recording of Mountain Language, the title of the play will be abbreviated to “ML”.

4. In all subsequent parenthetical references to the recording of Ashes to Ashes, the title of the play will be abbreviated to “AA”.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Naoko Yagi

Naoko Yagi is Professor of English in the School of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University and currently Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge. Her current research interests lie in twentieth-century English and Irish drama in production, especially, how speech sounds interact with other kinds of sound. She has co-edited three books, including Irish Theatre and Its Soundscapes (2015), and contributed chapters to books such as Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter (2009). Essays include “Laughter and the Audience: Krapp’s Last Tape in Performance” (2021) and “Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman in Two Archival Recordings” (2020). Having completed a BA and an MA at Sophia University, she obtained an MA and a PhD from the University of Warwick.