The Meaning of Peeling Paint (Notes on a Mitchell Mise-en-Scène)

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Notes

1. See ‘Revealing our 2017 colours’ on the Farrow & Ball website, http://www.farrow-ball.com/new-trends-2017/content/fcp-content (accessed June 18, 2018). For a critique of historical paint ranges as canny marketing exercises by companies including Farrow & Ball, see Amie Tsang, ‘All in the mix’, Financial Times (House & Home), February 17, 2012 https://www.ft.com/content/3b50786e-531b-11e1-8aa1-00144feabdc0 (accessed June 18, 2018).

2. Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (London: Verso, 2009).

3. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 20.

4. Ibid., 19.

5. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: SAGE Publications, 2005), 120.

6. Ibid., 18, emphasis by the author.

7. Ibid., 118.

8. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 66–111 (76).

9. Sarah Dillon, ‘Reinscribing De Quincey’s Palimpsest: the Significance of the Palimpsest in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies’, Textual Practice 19, no. 3 (2005): 243–63 (254).

10. Massey, For Space, 149 and 71.

11. Ibid., 118.

12. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992).

13. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (Abingdon: Routledge, 1994), 20.

14. Mark Fisher, Ghosts Of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014), 107.

15. Massey, For Space, 70.

16. Laura Levin, Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 15.

17. Massey, For Space, 13.

18. Eales in conversation with the author, April 20, 2017.

19. See ‘Immersive Worlds: Designing Katie Mitchell’s Theatre’ in The Theatre of Katie Mitchell, ed. Benjamin Fowler (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019) where Eales discusses this principle as it relates to designs like Cleansed (2015), which located Kane’s eclectic scenes in a single environment governed by the logic of a dreamscape.

20. Mitchell in conversation with the author, November 7, 2017.

21. Farncombe in conversation with author, July 5, 2017.

22. The three new doors joined four existing doors in the stage-left and -right walls. Carol’s 1970s pine furniture dominated stage-right, a 1990s ‘shabby chic’ aesthetic characterised Anna’s central strand, and the projected future of Bonnie’s world featured clean lines and minimalism in the stage-left section.

23. For more on this strategy see Margaret Jane Kidnie, ‘“We really can’t be doing 1603 now. We really can’t”: Katie Mitchell, Theatrical Adaptation, and Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness’, Shakespeare Bulletin 31, no. 4 (2013): 647–68.

24. Dillon, ‘Reinscribing De Quincey’s Palimpsest’, 253.

25. Massey, For Space, 110.

26. Dillon, ‘Reinscribing De Quincey’s Palimpsest’, 254.

27. As always in Mitchell’s process (where detailed character biographies and textual analysis are used to infer inherited thoughts and behaviours), but rarely this explicitly, family functions as the ultimate haunted structure.

28. Across her work, Mitchell has created structures that invite ‘palimpsestuous’ reading. See, for instance, her Live Cinema productions that overlay the unconnected writings of poets and dramatists (Franz Xaver Kroetz and Anne Sexton in Wunschkonzert, 2008; Strindberg and Inger Christensen in Fräulein Julie, 2010).

29. See Katie Mitchell, The Director’s Craft (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 55–62. All events and intentions, which Mitchell identifies in collaboration with the cast, are assiduously documented and enjoy the same status as the written text. Actors can call out for their ‘intention’ at any point in a rehearsal, just as they would a line of dialogue. This documentation is centralised and accessible to anyone, and often drawn on as a blueprint for adjustments in lighting and sound.

30. Alice Birch, Anatomy of a Suicide (London: Oberon Books, 2017), 135.

31. Rehearsal observation (London), Wednesday May 17, 2017.

32. Massey, For Space, 192. Mitchell’s artistic collaborators supported this event structure, and the bodily effects it produced in actors, with technology; James Farncombe (lighting designer) and Melanie Wilson (sound designer) plotted changes in their abstract, atmospheric or diegetic designs (the boundaries of which were creatively blurred) that registered events in barely perceptible (almost spectral) ways.

33. Fisher, Ghosts Of My Life, 111.

34. Birch, Anatomy, 235.

35. Ibid., 237.

36. Massey, For Space, 5.

37. Katie Mitchell, quoted in ‘Regisseurin Katie Mitchell im Gespräch’, Deutches Schauspielhaus Hamburg Spielzeit 2013–14 (Lüneburg: v Stern’sche Druckerei, 2013), 27.

38. Martin Crimp, The Hamburg Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 2019), 39–40.

39. Kimberly A. Powell, ‘Remapping the City: Palimpsest, Place, and Identity in Art Education Research’, Studies in Art Education 50, no. 1 (2008): 6–21 (19).

40. Crimp, The Hamburg Plays, 9.

41. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 76.

42. Crimp, The Hamburg Plays, 31.

43. Ibid., 8.

44. Ibid., 54.

45. Ibid., 53.

46. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 833–44.

47. See Crimp, The Hamburg Plays for the English edition, which reveals that Mitchell cut pages 76–83.

48. Ibid., 83.

49. Ibid., 12.

50. Rachel Clements, ‘Deconstructive Techniques and Spectral Technologies in Katie Mitchell’s Attempts on Her Life’, Contemporary Theatre Review 24, no. 3 (2014): 331–41 (333–4).

51. Crimp, The Hamburg Plays, 7.

52. Massey, For Space, 11.

53. They echo the way Mitchell, across her Live Cinema work, has wielded technology to materialise traces of women who disappear inside mirrors (Waves, 2006) or become trapped in wallpaper (The Yellow Wallpaper, 2013).

54. Levin, Performing Ground, 13.

55. Ibid., 17.

56. Most visibly, On Being an Angel #1 (Providence, Rhode Island, 1977) provided the poster for Mitchell’s A Dream Play (NT, 2005).

57. Mortimer in conversation with the author, September 26, 2017.

58. Levin, Performing Ground, 6.

59. Ibid., 17, emphasis by the author.

60. She retrieves them from existing narratives (e.g. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper; Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed With Kindness), conjures unhappy ghosts from canonical texts (e.g. Hamlet), or commissions new works (e.g. The Forbidden Zone) that insist we hold our attention on vanishing women, real and fictional.

61. Elaine Aston, ‘Feeling the Loss of Feminism: Sarah Kane’s Blasted and an Experiential Genealogy of Contemporary Women’s Playwrighting’, Theatre Journal 62, no. 4 (2010): 575–91 (577).

62. Aston, ‘Feeling the Loss of Feminism’, 590.

63. For a discussion of the term ‘postfeminism’ and its circulation in academic discourse see Rosalind Gill, ‘The affective, cultural and psychic life of postfeminism: A postfeminist sensibility 10 years on’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 20, no. 6 (2017): 606–26.

64. Similarly out of joint, it pre-dates the widespread shock to such complacency prompted by #MeToo.

65. Massey, For Space, 82.

66. Ibid., 87.

67. Maddy Costa, ‘Alternative Point of View: The Malady of Death’, Barbican Blog May 4, 2018 http://blog.barbican.org.uk/2018/05/alternative-point-of-view-the-malady-of-death/ (accessed July 15, 2018).

68. Wendy Brown, ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’, boundary 2 26, no. 3 (1999): 19–27 (26).

69. Fisher, Ghosts Of My Life, 24.

70. Levin, Performing Ground, 23.

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Notes on contributors

Benjamin Fowler

Benjamin Fowler is a Lecturer in Drama, Theatre & Performance at the University of Sussex.