Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 307
Katie Mitchell’s Miss Julie, which opened in Berlin and then in London in 2013, adapts the 1888 Strindberg play
into a movie being shot as we watch the action both on the screen and on the stage, accompanied by a solo
cellist in a room by herself. © Geraint Lewis
the play’s actors. There was no scenery on the stage, apart
from some three candle-lit Cycladic statues on the back
wall, and the lighting cables and instruments hung in
full sight above and around the action. Soon the actorushers
turned into chorus-principals, alternately speaking
in synchronized choruses, singing and dancing to Balkan
music (the play drew deliberate parallels to the war
then going on in Bosnia-Herzegovina), and playing the
principal roles of Euripides’s play. Critics were largely
ecstatic about the production, describing it as “eloquent
and enthralling,” “magnificent and devastating,” and
“chillingly, compellingly contemporary.” Others were
less enthusiastic, though this mixture of rave and panning
reviews led one critic to call her “a director who polarizes
audiences like no other”—a reputation that still lingers.
Yet great theatre is not for the dainty. Mitchell’s NT productions
have included cutting-edge renditions of powerful
ancient Greek classics (The Oresteia, Women of Troy, Iphigenia
at Aulis, in addition to Phoenician Women) all channeling
examples of twentieth-century warfare. Her 2004
Iphigenia production, for example, told the classic story of
Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter—with Agamemnon
wearing a Nazi SS uniform as a chorus of five fashionable
1930s society ladies, in shiny black dresses, handbags, and
high-heeled shoes trade barbs and pleasantries as the hapless
Iphigenia is stripped of her bridal gear and murdered
at the demand of this Greek Führer. “Mitchell delivers a
mind-bending intensity” said the Guardian reviewer.
But Mitchell, while clearly in the avant-garde, also
has strong roots in the traditional realism of Konstantin
Stanislavsky’s acting system, which she studied in Russia.
Directing Iphigenia at Aulis, for example, she asked
the actors to recall a situation in their lives when they
were deeply afraid, and then to reenact it in front of the
entire company. “In this way,” Mitchell reports, “you
encourage the actors to think about using very precise
physical information from real-life situations to communicate
the moments in the action of the play.” So, as
an Associate at the NT, she varied her repertoire with
acclaimed—and sometimes castigated—productions of
Chekhov (Ivanov, The Seagull, Three Sisters), along
with rarely performed plays from the past (Thomas
Heywood’s 1603 A Woman Killed with Kindness, Ferdinand
Bruckner’s 1923 Pains of Youth, Alfred Jarry’s
1896 Ubu Roi), and multimedia adaptations of novels
by Dostoevsky and Virginia Woolf. She has also, surprisingly,
tried her hand staging children’s plays, an
adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat and an
original version of Beauty and the Beast—both created
at the suggestion of her then-four-year-old daughter,
Edie. And she has written an outstanding textbook on
her trade, The Director’s Craft. It is, ultimately, her