Life is fragmented; so even though the form is unusual, the content is true to life. I was confident the audience would piece it together.
—Katie Mitchell (Jackson 2008)
Introduction
At Thomas Ostermeier’s invitation, Katie Mitchell staged a production of Fräulein Julie
(2010) for the Schaubühne that was advertised as “after August Strindberg” (frei nach
August Strindberg), apprising audiences of its debt to and distinction from Strindberg’s play
of the same name.117 Mitchell cut eighty per cent of the text and filtered its events
entirely through the prism of the maid Kristin, Strindberg’s marginal third character whom the author himself in his preface described as “without individuality” (1953: 111). Whilst the director’s feminist interest in a female consciousness lingering in the margins of a canonical text quickly became apparent, the production’s most visible innovation
was its intermedial strategy.118 Mitchell gave form to Kristin’s consciousness through
techniques borrowed from cinema and radio, created live and enacted in full view of the audience. These methods provided the means of evoking the subjective perceptual field
117 The production is listed as Kristin, nach Fräulein Julie on the website of Fifty Nine Productions
(Leo Warner’s video and projection design company). This seems to have been the title under which the work travelled to the Avignon Festival in 2011, although its 2013 run at the Barbican
used the original Schaubühne title of Fräulein Julie.
118 Intermediality has proved a useful critical term in discussions and evaluations of contemporary
mixed media experimentation in live performance. As Chiel Kattenbelt theorises the term, intermediality describes “co-relations between different media that result in a redefinition of the media that are influencing each other, […] which allows for new dimensions of perception and experience to be explored” (2008: 25). I apply it to Live Cinema because of its apt sense of an “inter” space between media, which generates new modes of perception.
of Mitchell’s new protagonist through sound and live-streamed visual output projected onto a screen above the stage. For example, during the sequence when Strindberg has Kristin fall asleep on stage, Mitchell cinematised Kristin’s dreams in an extended visual
departure from the play’s narrative. In her new narrative, 119 what remained of
Strindberg’s script was wholly organised around what Kristin hears and sees, or fails to hear and see.
This production epitomises a technique that Mitchell and her frequent
collaborator, video director Leo Warner, have come to call “Live Cinema”.120 The name
registers the invigorating effects of theatre’s temporal immediacy on their use of recording media, and how the cinematic has emerged as the main context in which to view this live performance language. It was also the first of Mitchell’s productions to impact on theatre culture both at home and abroad, following an invitation from producers at London’s Barbican theatre to bring the original German language
production to their main stage in 2013. This chapter ends with a close analysis of Fräulein
Julie, but in order to understand Mitchell’s Live Cinema treatment of this theatre classic we have to address the genesis of the technique in her adaptation of novels. This line of enquiry began in exploratory workshops in the early 2000s and first reached audiences
in the 2006 production of Waves. Mitchell turned to an ineffably literary modernist novel
in response to what she experienced as the narrowing horizons of conventional naturalism, and, influenced in part by her exposure to techniques used by The Wooster Group in 2002, her work adapting Woolf for the stage opened up alternative representational methods. Grounded in Mitchell’s search for pragmatic solutions to
119 Mitchell adapted Fräulein Julie herself, preparing the textual edit in advance of rehearsals. She
also prepared the heavily condensed edits of the novels that inspired Waves (2006) and …some trace
of her (2008), issuing these to actors as soon as rehearsals began. Mitchell has since delegated this
work. For Reise durch die Nacht (Köln 2012), Lyndsey Turner acted as the dramaturg and Duncan
Macmillan wrote the dialogue. Turner also adapted Die Gelbe Tapete (Schaubühne 2013).
Macmillan adapted Wunschloses Unglück (Vienna 2013), and wrote and compiled text for The
Forbidden Zone (Schaubühne/Salzburg 2014).
120 See Oltermann (2014). See also 59 productions (2014). Although instigated and conceptualised
by Mitchell, these productions are collaborations. My frequent references to “Mitchell’s” Live Cinema work seek in no way to diminish the contribution of Leo Warner (or Grant Gee in those productions where he replaced Warner) as Director of Photography. They merely reflect the focus of this thesis on Mitchell’s own trajectory.
theatricalising the novel form, the innovative digital and postmodern techniques she used became strategies for representing what Woolf described as the “luminous halo” of consciousness (1994 [1925]: 160). Seen from this angle, Mitchell’s work can be viewed as restoring auratic power to the stage, using the same technological tools Walter Benjamin
famously characterised in 1936 as robbing art of its aura.121 Rather than reducing actors
to automata, technology in Mitchell’s theatre affords a means of exploring subjective experience on two fronts – firstly, that of the character, and secondly, through inviting the spectator to participate in a perceptual encounter akin to that Woolf’s novel affords its reader.
The under-examined link between the novel form and Mitchell’s Live Cinema work is crucial to an understanding of this radical transformation in her aesthetic, which before 2006 had been associated with exquisitely detailed fourth wall naturalism. As we will see, media theorists have been quick to perceive in Mitchell’s appropriation of technological tools an impulse to splinter naturalism apart, and have duly emphasised the significance of deconstruction and a Brechtian separation of elements in their readings of this work. Some scholars have cited Mitchell’s convergence of live action and technological apparatus as an effective illustration of cyborg or posthuman innovations in the theatre, even as others have critiqued the inadequacy of her methods in relation to
concerns theorised by intermedial theorists and practitioners. 122 Far from promoting
fragmentation and deconstruction, however, Mitchell obliges her audience to discover connections and associations between the work’s separated elements. In the “inter” space opened up between media, she invites spectators to assemble a coherent whole held together by “consciousness” as its operative logic. Mitchell implements technology to deepen the humanism of her work rather than wielding it as a tool of exposure, alienation and critique, with fragmentation working as a key strategy in encouraging subjectivity (however fragile, multiple, flawed or unstable) to emerge. In these
121 See Benjamin (2008 [1936]).
intermedial projects, the site of that nascent subjectivity resides in the spectators themselves, invited to become active makers of meaning through processing connections between the disparate elements that form the theatrical-cinematic event. Indeed, Mitchell has compared this work to Cubism in its ability to show simultaneously “all the planes and the perspectives of the construction of character” (Dramaten 2012), and this chapter will draw other links between Mitchell’s practice and the dynamic and subversive strategies that energised modernist experimentation as the early technologies of cinema and radio altered the perceptual fields of its key artists. However, in stressing Live Cinema’s relation to subjectivity and consciousness, I shall argue that this technique is most meaningfully viewed as an extension of Mitchell’s work on naturalism, rather than its radical deconstruction.