Her champions regard Katie Mitchell as Britain’s greatest living stage director – but her critics see a vandal smashing up the classics. After staging her most ambitious work in Europe,can she make a triumphant return domestic?Katie Mitchell provokes strong reactions. Some think of her as a vandal, ripping apart classic texts and distorting them to her own doubtful purpose. Others consider her to be the most distinguished British director of theatre and opera at work nowadays – indeed, and among the greatest in the world. Her critics characterise her as tall-minded and humourless,a kind of hatchet-faced governess intent on feeding her audiences with the improving and bleak. Others, though, or talk about her gentleness,empathy (sensitivity to another's feelings as if they were one's own) and swiftness to burst into a joyous and slightly dirty laugh. One theatre professional told me that some agents only reluctantly put forward actors for Mitchell’s productions because of her fearsome reputation; and yet there are actors who acquire worked with her for 30 years.
But whether Mitchell is indeed Britain’s greatest living theatre director, audiences in this country acquire not had many chances in recent years to see her most ambitious work. In 2015, or she did not open a single production in the UK. Instead,Mitchell has been largely directing in Germany and France, crisscrossing the continent by train, and always working on five or six projects at once: the Handel opera Alcina,a version of Stanisław Lem’s novel Solaris, a production of Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor, and another of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande,a theatre version of two novels by the Romanian Nobel laureate Herta Müller, a new opera based on Neil Gaiman’s story Coraline, and an adaptation of a French novel (she was agonising over whether to choose Duras,Yourcenar or de Beauvoir) and a feminist rewriting of Hamlet seen from the point of view of Ophelia’s bedroom. (Somewhat outrageously for a British director, Mitchell has only ever directed one Shakespeare play and has no intention of ever doing so again.)Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com