Katie Mitchell interview: ‘I felt honour-bound to share science’

We all want to save the planet, but you know? Whatcha gonna do about it?

Me: I recycle a bit.

London’s great avant-garde director Katie Mitchell has gone a little further.

‘We are teetering on the brink of disastrous population growth and major environmental change,’ she tells me in a break from rehearsals for one of three major plays she has on stage in London this season. ‘Maybe I’m wrong to suggest that the change we’re facing is “the big one”. But it is the one I’m preoccupied with. I’ve even stopped flying – imagine!’

The leading light of naturalistic British theatre in her thirties, Mitchell, now 50, has spent the last decade drifting far to the left. Virtually absent from her home country of late, she’s been directing ever more ambitious shows for European audiences who lap up her every concept: her hugely acclaimed Berlin show ‘Lungs’ was entirely off the electrical grid, with the power for the lights and PA produced by the poor actors, who performed from bikes hooked up to a generator.

But now she’s back – by Eurostar, of course– to helm not only a terrifyingly gothic revival of Chekhov’s ‘The Cherry Orchard’ and a sci-fi opera for primary school kids, 'The Way Back Home', (‘they all like counter-tenors!’ she notes, brightly), but ‘2071’, a show that may just possibly save our entire planet.

Theatre has a notoriously bad track record of producing meaningful work about global warming – you’ll actually get barred from the National for life if you bring up its woeful flop ‘Greenland’. But Mitchell, ever the idiosyncratic genius, has grasped that the main problem with eco-theatre is that it’s over-populated with playwrights and actors. ‘Ten Billion’, her brilliant 2012 work for new-writing mecca the Royal Court, was essentially just a terrifying lecture on overpopulation from scientist Stephen Emmott, tricked out with some directorial light and magic.

‘I met a scientist,’ she says, ‘and I believed the science he told me, and I felt honour-bound to share that in the only way I can.’

Her new show ‘2071’ is an even more ambitious follow-up. Staged in the Court’s much larger main house, it’s a dazzling multimedia spectacle, a dance of light and music enfolding a talk by Professor Chris Rapley of UCL which explains in plain English what climate change is, what it’s done to us and what it’s going to do to us. It doesn’t beat about the bush, it just gives lots of facts, lots of figures, no bias, no bullshit.

In its way, it’s Mitchell’s most mainstream piece in ages, a world away from her gloriously obtuse German work. Is this her going back to her roots?

‘Of course not!’ she laughs. ‘I don’t think I’m turning back into something I was – I’m moving forward. And I am finding it very difficult.’

'2071' runs at the Royal Court theatre until Nov 15. 'The Cherry Orchard' runs at the Young Vic until Nov 29. 'The Way Back Home' runs at the Young Vic Dec 11-23.