Wreaking Havoc

Abstract

In this essay I employ the tools of cognitive psychology to frame the work of Katie Mitchell and her controversial National Theatre staging of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed. (2016). My discussion and title refers to the work of the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio and his study of emotion, The Feeling of What Happens (2001), a work that was also an influence on Mitchell’s approach to directing. I use this to discuss Mitchell’s staging as well as my visceral, embodied response to the play, in the twin scenes of live performance and the archive.

The essay draws upon practitioner interviews and archival research to trace the composition of this creative carnage. The archive is a container for theatrical wreckage, preserving fragments, traces, remains and leftovers, to be scrutinized, and sometimes re-imagined as narrative. In my encounter with the performance documentation and the associated records of Mitchell’s theatre making process, I gained new understanding of the aesthetic and affective dimensions of my experience as a spectator and read this knowledge back into the work. My account brings first- and third-person perspectives into dialogue in its form and content as, a witness to a trauma that was and wasn’t mine. Drawing upon feminist, phenomenological and affect theory, I investigate the traces of what happened, how and why it matters.

Notes

1 Interview with the author, 22 May 2017, London. Further references are cited in the text as interview.