Whereas Thomas Ostermeier fastened on Ibsen’s plays in the early 2000s, Katie
Mitchell has avoided them since her RSC production of Ghosts in 1993. Instead,
Chekhov emerged as foundational in her ongoing project of animating robust and meticulous representations of human behaviour. Ibsen offered Ostermeier naturalistic situations through which to analyse contemporary neoliberal structures of feeling, as will be explored in Chapter 2. In contrast, Mitchell’s interest in Chekhov was primarily a response to his radical formal qualities. Christopher Innes describes him as the naturalist for whom “politics form only the most muted subtext” (2000: 128); references to contemporary events are hinted at only obliquely in his plays, and characters rarely expound outright polemics. Indeed, rather than politically charged content, Chekhov’s writing offered Mitchell a methodology.
However, as she points out in the above quotation, Chekhov’s radical formalism
is political in its own right. Studying his plays analytically, she came to view text in terms of its ability to disclose deeper structures that allow actors and spectators to project themselves into the mental states of others. Consequently her engagement with these
works has proven crucial because it forced her to develop practical strategies prompting spectators to recognise themselves in the individual psyches that Chekhov’s dramaturgy interweaves. Beginning with the actor, Mitchell worked under the assumption that his or her full immersion in the world of the play would grant spectators access to the text. However, finding that what is legible to an actor is not always legible to an audience, Mitchell began investigating means of communicating with spectators more directly – even situating them within the drama – circumventing the actor in order to facilitate audience “recognition”. Chekhov thus pushed Mitchell along a pathway that would lead directly to her experiments with technology as a means of prising psyches open – affording even more personal and direct communion with spectators invited to identify themselves in Mitchell’s art. An analysis of her engagement with Chekhov thus supports the wider claim that, in contrast to how they were generally understood at the time, Mitchell’s experiments with technology in the late 2000s were consonant with, rather than a departure from, a larger aesthetic trajectory.
It is important to acknowledge the magnitude of the challenge these plays posed for Mitchell, who found that “if you do not get the deeper structure, it is like walking through a snowstorm. You cannot see anything” (Shevtsova 2006: 16). The significance of Chekhov’s writing to the director’s development stems from what she described to
Aleks Sierz (2003) as its impossibility: “Despite its title, [Three Sisters] is about 16 or 17
people, and has four or five stories going on at the same time – how do you create a focused narrative from such an egalitarian canvas?” Her painterly metaphor relates to the analogue for Chekhov’s innovatory style she found in art history, describing it as the theatrical equivalent of Impressionism in that “every bit of the painted canvas has equal value” (Sierz 2003). When Mitchell gathered her insights into a handbook on directing published in 2009, she warned young directors, “One of the pitfalls in early attempts to direct is a levelling-out, in which all the moments in the action are given equal value by the performers” (2009: 61). Since, as we shall see, the director has been openly self-
critical concerning her own inability to manage sections of his works, it is tempting to
hear this advice as a lesson Mitchell learnt directly from Chekhov. 26
In combating the snowstorm tendency of Chekhov’s writing, Mitchell developed close reading strategies in order to diagnose what she has termed the Idea Structures that
lay at a play’s heart.27 Mitchell has used Idea Structures to locate access points in the
complex web of Chekhov’s dramaturgy, and to help her focus events. In striving to communicate his plays clearly and precisely she has investigated a whole array of stage techniques, carefully orchestrated and tightly connected to an Idea Structure that, as a product of her literary analysis, remains firmly linked to the text itself.
By 2006, however, many critics were beginning to argue that something had
gone radically wrong, and Mitchell’s The Seagull aroused particularly heated debate
regarding authorial intention and the limits of directorial intervention.28 Although fed by
a root system firmly anchored in the text, the thickly textured performances that her methods elicited had always been only partially mediated by spoken language. This goes some way towards explaining certain critics’ frustrations with what they perceived as
Mitchell’s “interference” with the text, although reaction to The Seagull also reveals its
status as a transitional work. In extending the reach of her immersive techniques, Mitchell was developing a performance style that demanded the phenomenological engagement of her spectators, and thereby challenged conventional habits of spectatorial participation. Organising her productions and their vivid use of stage techniques around Idea Structures, Mitchell forged a form of poetic realism that went beyond common expectations surrounding naturalism’s role in “bringing a written play to life” (Billington 2006). In turn, the increasing sensual intensity of her poetic realist productions at the
National Theatre in the early 2000s – including Three Sisters (2003), Iphigenia at Aulis
(2004) and The Seagull (2006) – pushed at the limits of a naturalistic approach to
26 See Mitchell’s comments on the failures of her Three Sisters, discussed on p.52 of this chapter.
27 See Jones (2008); Mitchell (2009: 44-51); Rebellato (2010: 331). Throughout this chapter I have
capitalised Mitchell’s own terminology in order to add clarity.
28 For representative reviews see Billington (2006); Kettle (2006); Morley (2006); and Nightingale
character and behaviour, eventually bursting through in the intermedial experimentation that distinguished Mitchell’s later output. It was, however, the desire to render Chekhov legible that instigated her development of these rigorous and experimental techniques.