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Immersive worlds: Designing Katie Mitchell's theatre | Alex Eales in conversation with Benjamin Fowler
No full text4x45 is an innovative series of commissioned academic lectures and interviews, captured on film, providing a range of perspectives on a topic, theme or practitioner. Each volume, comprising four chapters, will be hosted on Digital Theatre+ and published in print by Routledge. In this interview from Volume One, ‘The Theatre of Katie Mitchell’, scholar Ben Fowler and designer Alex Eales discuss Eales’ collaborations with Mitchell, including his work on Cleansed, Happy Days and Night Train. Eales gives insight into the process of working on a production, including the designer’s role in working with a text and the detailed naturalism of his set and lighting design
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Immersive worlds: Designing Katie Mitchell's theatre | Alex Eales in conversation with Benjamin Fowler
No full text4x45 is an innovative series of commissioned academic lectures and interviews, captured on film, providing a range of perspectives on a topic, theme or practitioner. Each volume, comprising four chapters, will be hosted on Digital Theatre+ and published in print by Routledge. In this interview from Volume One, ‘The Theatre of Katie Mitchell’, scholar Ben Fowler and designer Alex Eales discuss Eales’ collaborations with Mitchell, including his work on Cleansed, Happy Days and Night Train. Eales gives insight into the process of working on a production, including the designer’s role in working with a text and the detailed naturalism of his set and lighting design
Re-scripting Realism: Katie Mitchell and Thomas Ostermeier at the Schaubühne
No full textThomas Ostermeier has raised the international profile of the Schaubühne over the last two decades as a centre for experiments in a new, contemporary theatrical realism. Since 2010, he has invited the British director Katie Mitchell (b. 1964) to contribute six original productions that bite back against the gendered biases of the conventional realist form. Mitchell adapts dramatic and literary texts into realist scenarios that she then re-frames using technology – often, but not always, involving cameras. This chapter argues that Mitchell and Ostermeier are linked in their (certainly distinct) directorial attempts to measure texts anew in contemporary circumstances, using them to craft highly tangible dramatic worlds while harnessing the materiality of those worlds to convey immaterial forces. In this, their work rehabilitates a much maligned genre of theatrical production. Although what passes as theatrical ‘realism’ has varied over time, contemporary theatre theorists (and some reviewers, too) tend to align it with simple mimesis to signify forces that entrench, rather than challenge, a determinist world-view and naturalise essentialist notions of identity. Realism has come to figure as the antagonist of experiment and innovation that characterise properly politicised forms of theatre-making. Offering an antidote to this prevailing view, I connect the work of Ostermeier and Mitchell as cultural materialists who demand our reappraisal of texts and the realisms they might animate. I do so to insist upon the political relevance of dramatic theatre and realism as a theatrical genre in a highly complex twenty-first century setting. This chapter examines their separate productions of the same play, Franz Xaver Kroetz’ Wunschkonzert. It also tracks Mitchell’s work at the Schaubühne since Fräulein Julie in 2010, through to her adaptation (with Alice Birch) of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando in 2019. Contrasting, in the final section, Mitchell’s Ophelias Zimmer (Ophelia’s Room) and Ostermeier’s Hamlet (which for a time co-existed in the Schaubühne repertoire), it argue that as the institution has widened to embrace Mitchell’s perspective this has exposed significant blindspots in Ostermeier’s work on Shakespeare, particularly his licensing of the violent anarchic male clown allowed to dominate stage and ensemble. Nevertheless, what links these directors is their refusal to settle for realisms that reinforce, rather than question, the status quo. They create work that arrays itself against any complacent acceptance of the world ‘as it is’, testing the critical purchase of a commitment to texts and to fictive totalities as a potent artistic response to the political crises of our times
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The theatre of Katie Mitchell
No full textThis first volume in the 4x45 series investigates the work of theatre director Katie Mitchell. Pausing to reconsider a career in progress, it engages with some of Mitchell’s most recent work in the UK and Europe across theatre, opera, and Live Cinema. It also takes a longer view, considering the early turns that Mitchell took at the start of her career in the late 1980s. This volume gives full scope to the voice of the practitioner, alongside scholarly perspectives, in order to understand the work from within. Interviews with Mitchell’s collaborators get inside her process – and inside the thinking of key artists who help craft the distinctive visual, aesthetic and technological forms of Mitchell’s productions. Three major concerns criss-cross these contributions: the political implications of aesthetic form; the meaning of Mitchell’s interest in the radical project of early Naturalism; and the influence of Europe on Mitchell’s avant-garde experimentalism, which often draws on technology to open up new modes of perception and experience. An accessible and encompassing examination of one of Europe's most celebrated theatrical talents, 4x45 | The Theatre of Katie Mitchell is a unique resource for scholars,students and practitioners of Theatre Studies, Performance and Directing
(Re)mediating the modernist novel: Katie Mitchell's live cinema work
No full textBritish director Katie Mitchell’s intermedial experimentation in ‘Live Cinema’ forces film, literature and performance into collision. This chapter examines a body of work inaugurated by Mitchell’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves (National Theatre, 2006). It investigates the formative influence of the modernist novel on the Live Cinema genre, arguing that intermedial experimentation offers contemporary performance makers ways of exploring subjectivity akin to cross-media experiments in modernist literature. It also documents the influence of The Wooster Group on Mitchell’s thinking as she began to adapt Woolf’s writing for the stage. The chapter culminates in a reading of Mitchell’s free adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie (Berlin Schaubühne, 2009), reconfigured from the point of view of the servant Kristin and organised as an exploration of ‘consciousness’
Culture clash: what the Wooster Group revealed about the RSC (and British theatre hegemony) in Troilus & Cressida
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Dangerous border crossings: Nicolas Stemann's merchant in Munich
No full textThis chapter analyses Nicolas Stemann’s production of The Merchant of Venice for the Munich Kammerspiele in 2015. It argues that the director’s strategies transformed the play into an echo chamber for contemporary moral and mental situations, drawing on a series of global and local contexts (terror attacks; the rise of right-wing populism; Europe’s so-called ‘refugee crisis’) that were causing debates about stereotype, difference and tolerance to intensify in German society. Using suspended screens from which the actors read Shakespeare’s text throughout the performance, Stemann forced critical distance between the play and its contemporary enunciation, creating an elaborate counterpoint that caused multiple forms of exclusion to resonate (not least in the sections that presented Shylock as a Muslim figure). Examining Stemann’s procedures with reference to other directors’ attempts to resist the play’s textual anti-Semitism from within, this chapter explores the questions raised by a production that put Shakespeare’s “comedy” itself on trial. It also seeks to demonstrate how Stemann’s interrogation of the text doubled as an interrogation of the role that classics might play in reacting to contemporary political crisis, particularly in the context of the highly-subsidised German state theatre
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