Katie Mitchell: Learning from Europe

'Katie Mitchell: Learning from Europe.' In Contemporary European Theatre Directors, edited by Maria M. Delgado and Dan Rebellato. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010, pp. 317-38.

Translated into Polish as 'Katie Mitchell. Uczenie się od Europy.' Didaskalia Gazeta Teatralia.  119 (February 2014): pp. 84-92.

In Contemporary European Theatre Directors, the book I co-edited with Maria Delgado, my main contribution was a chapter on the work of Katie Mitchell. The article takes her work from the early years, with her company Classics on a Shoestring, through the 'anthropological phase' characterised by research trips to Greece to trace the journey of Orestes and to Bergen to investigate Ibsen's light, through her renewed and intense work with actors, to the pressing against the limits of text that characterised her work in the early 200s, and ending (at that point) in the explosion of multimedia imagery and sound in her work, beginning with Waves and continuing in ever more sophisticated ways right to the present day. The pre-history of her theatre career in a Churchill scholarship to visit theatres in Eastern Europe forms a kind of preface to the article and throughout, I suggest, she has turned away from Britain, with its text-first tradition that strictly limits the freedom of directors, to a European tradition in which the director intervenes in and reinvents classic texts.  

Since the book was published, there have been new collaborations (with Simon Stephens and Duncan Macmillan, in particular), a wave of children's shows, and, another path that led from Waves,  a series of strong and counter-intuitive adaptations (of what one might consider unadaptable work). If we ever do a second edition, it would be interesting to explore this work.

One downside of Katie's embrace of the European tradition is that it has seemed increasingly difficult for her to work in Britain. Indeed, much of her most exciting work of the past few years has been in Germany. Her strong association with Nick Hytner's National Theatre seemed to end after AWoman Killed With Kindness in 2011.

But there is hope. I had a conversation with Rufus Norris last year, at that time planning his first season at the National. One of his remarks that struck me was 'I have to find a way to get Katie Mitchell back working in this building'. So we wait.

The essay can be read in the book. If you're researching Katie Mitchell you might find helpful this chronology of her work that I compiled while working on the chapter. It's not complete and don't hold me responsible for errors, but it's something.