What a pity the nominees for this year’s Turner Prize have already been announced: Katie Mitchell’s high-concept multimedia presentation based on Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ would have been a shoo-in for the Tate’s contemporary art gong. The Cottesloe stage presents two horizontal visual bands. In the lower portion a company of eight actors, including Ben Whishaw, scamper about in semi-darkness doubling as film crew, swivelling lights, arranging props, operating cameras, treading on sound-effects board and – just occasionally – acting. Above, the fruits of their labours are screened live, in what is presumably intended to be a historically atmospheric black and white.
If you want to know the story or philosophical themes of ‘The Idiot’, you’re going to have to read the novel since ‘…Some Trace of Her’ isn’t much interested in narrative. Indeed, what’s striking is that such sophisticated techniques – there’s an impressive array of equipment on stage – should be employed to such rudimentary ends: the resulting film is decidedly studenty in construction and the image quality poor. But of course Mitchell’s production isn’t about creating a single-focus finished spectacle, it’s about process, and in this regard it’s briefly diverting. We see how the illusion of train travel or of a spinning, shattering vase is created, and how speakers at opposite ends of the stage can be made to seem to be having a tête-à-tête on screen. But if you’re in the least bit film-literate you won’t be surprised by any of this.
,rail
