Theatre

Going into battle: director Katie Mitchell

Many people have an extreme reaction to the work of the director Katie Mitchell. In blogland at least, she's the Marmite director par excellence, some praising her to the skies as the great hope of British Theatre, and others damning her as the worst example of director's theatre, arrogantly scrawling her own signature across the stage at the expense of the playwright's. It's probably not that her work is so radical compared to some smaller companies, but rather that she works at the National Theatre where audiences for, say, a production of 'The Seagull' tend to anticipate a familiar friend rather than a radical reassessment. Actually, although I'm normally in the positive camp, 'The Seagull', which appeared confusingly and irrationally to be set after WWI, was one of my least favourite Mitchell productions. There've been times, too, when I've been frustrated by the lack of light on the actors' faces and an inability to hear what they say. But ever since she first made her mark with Classics on a Shoestring in the late '80s, her productions have been distinguished by the intensity of the emotions, the realism of the acting, and the creation of a very distinctive world (influenced by her admiration for Pina Bausch). It wasn't until she arrived at the National Theatre that she started combining that realism with a use of film invariably created by the actors on stage. She's one of the few directors who understands how to use video in the theatre.
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Critics have, on the whole, been more generous than the bloggers. When her boss, Nicholas Hytner, jumped to the defence of Mitchell and Emma Rice in the now infamous Dead White Males episode in which Hytner accused certain long-serving male critics of sexism, most of those implicated trawled through their cuttings to confirm that Mitchell at least had received more good reviews than bad ones. She was working at Glyndebourne at the time, and says that Hytner's defence made her feel 'fantastically supported and exposed in equal measure'. The National is very much her home and where she is currently working on her eleventh production, Euripides' 'Women of Troy'. In particular, she has repeatedly returned to the Greeks both inside the National and out.

'Women of Troy' is a devastating anti-war play depicting a world in which there are no moral certainties, so no comfort for those critics who feel that Hytner should sit Mitchell down with a hefty anthology of comedies and demand that she pick one. But to meet, like so many artists who immerse themselves in death and destruction, she couldn't be warmer, occasionally letting out a vast cackling laugh. I put it to her that her productions are set in what a friend once described as 'Katie Mitchell land'. Asked to explain, I only get as far as the use of rain and ballroom dancing, before she throws up her hands in defeat, crying: 'Yes. Do you think I should start again? I tried in "Waves" to see where else you could go.' She's less apologetic when I use the word auteur. 'What does that mean exactly? It means interpretation. Casting an actor is an act of interpretation. There's a signature in every director's work. Possibly because I'm more visual than other directors, the signature is stronger on the eye. But it's the ideas that create the visual look and as I am quite regularly doing plays that are involved with the themes of death, or war, or violence, it results in a certain visual landscape. My aim is to communicate each play as clearly as I possibly can in the time in which I'm working.'

There are no prizes for guessing why she is directing Euripides' tragedy. This is her second attempt on the play; the first was in 1991 during the first Gulf War. It's also no surprise that the production is not set either at the time of the Trojan War or in the playwright's lifetime but rather in the future. 'There's something about dressing actors in tunics and Jesus sandals, or about an attempt to do a reconstruction with masks,' she says, 'which I think distances the viewer from the reality contained in the material. You go "Thank heavens we don't behave like that now." ' But, she says, you don't need to ram the comparisons home. 'We all have to cope with the radio every morning. I think that's why I wanted to do the play. I turn on the radio and there I am in my kitchen with my little girl and they say there's been a terrorist attack and I go all alert and think of her. And then they say "In Iraq" and I literally switch it off in my head. So I thought one should have a look at it and what it would be like to be there.'

'Women of Troy' previews from Nov 21 at the National Theatre, Lyttelton.