In 2002, Mitchell was invited to watch The Wooster Group’s production of To You, The
Birdie! (Phédre) when it played at London’s LIFT festival,133 and to offer her response to
the show at a symposium discussing the Group’s work at London’s Cochrane Theatre. The symposium was titled “Working over the Classic Text – Adaptations and Interpretations,” and Mitchell’s reflections on The Wooster Group’s multi-sensory techno-corporeal adaptation of Racine’s play, which combined live with recorded elements shuttled across the stage on mobile screens, offers keen insights into the mind of
a director already one year into her investigation into adapting The Waves. This touring
production from a celebrated avant-garde New York company both inspired Mitchell and fuelled her frustration with British mainstream representational habits, as was evident in her closing remarks:
The Wooster Group is transcendentally inspiring. But I do feel that it should be normal. I feel that really passionately. I feel trapped by not being able to play with the written word. (Heathfield et al. 2002)
133 Elizabeth LeCompte’s production visited the Riverside Studios as part of the London
International Festival of Theatre from 9-23 May 2002. After eighteen months of rehearsals and work-in-progress showings, the first public performance had occurred in Paris in November 2001.
Mitchell was responding positively to the formal innovation and invention of a production in which, although Racine’s text appeared largely intact, naturalism was eschewed. The Woosters revealed the possibility of escaping naturalism’s external trappings whilst remaining committed to the written word in playful, and meaningful, ways. Unlike the detailed social realism of Mitchell’s own work on Chekhov up to this
point, the mise en scène of this adaptation of Phédre was organised around striking visual
metaphors – most noticeably the badminton court on which the play was staged, demanding enormous athleticism of the actors as their characters batted a shuttlecock back and forth during key scenes. This distilled the play’s emphasis on social and formal
rules into a concrete situation that obliged actors – literally and metaphorically – to play.
Most pertinent here, however, is the fact that The Wooster Group forced technology into collision with Racine’s neoclassical text, using microphones and projection screens to separate voices from bodies (as well as pre-recorded projections of bodies from their live counterparts). Mitchell’s response helps us clarify her attitude towards the technological separation of elements that she would go on to pursue, and offers a means
of explicitly connecting this strategy with her desire to investigate facets of character
consciousness in her intermedial work.
In To You, The Birdie! the actor Kate Valk was responsible for embodying Phédre, lending her a neurasthenic intensity taken to extreme limits in her consistent need to evacuate her bowels (with considerable assistance provided by numerous attendants who helped her mount a mobile commode). Valk’s body, however, was divorced from Phédre’s voice and thoughts, which were spoken through a microphone by a male reader (Scott Shepherd) – indeed, as Mitchell noted, “every piece of text was technically mediated, [which is] a cultural taboo in the [British] mainstream”, but “it was in the separation of word and action […] where the deeper radicalism lay” (qtd. in Heathfield et al.). Not only was Racine’s protagonist divided between two performers, the audience was invited to attend to both simultaneously in the theatrical space. Mitchell’s reflections on these methods reveal the germination of ideas that visibly
emerged in her own work four years later. After watching The Wooster Group, she reflected on the implications of this separation from two points of view – the actor’s, and the character’s. In her talk, Mitchell asked Group actors directly if it was hard to be the body and be denied the voice, holding such precise psychological and physical intensity as someone else spoke their characters’ words. She also identified their technique’s propensity to help actors avoid the dangers words pose in conventional drama, suggesting that they tended to lure actors towards performances that assume characters are able to say precisely what they mean and think, thus reducing their complexity:
In theatre, words [often] tend to lead us to think of character as a fixed unchanging entity, which is certainly not how we experience ourselves as people, however much we might like to. So for me, the device of dividing the voice and the body of one character between two performers started to chip away at this simplification and approached an idea of character which is probably closer to how we experience ourselves. (Heathfield et al. 2002)
The Wooster Group, then, liberated Mitchell to conceptualise character as portrayed by multiple labourers, and also multiple techniques, within the frame of a unified production style that would accommodate different kinds of acting. Mitchell seems to suggest here that technological separation held the potential to outdo the subtlety achieved by an individual actor working in a naturalistic mode, finding alternative, and somehow more accurate, means of rendering dramatic character lifelike. Indeed, Mitchell perceived the Group’s methods to have liberated the text itself, with radical implications for spectators: “No-one owned the words and therefore we were free to play our own tunes on those words” (ibid). However, although Mitchell suggested that this fragmentation made multiple responses available for spectators, she was adamant that, for her, such openness led her deeper into character, and deeper into the play. As she asserted in the Q&A afterwards, “this production revealed Racine,” even as others
argued that it deconstructed, distanced and objectified the play and the playwright.134
Rather than experiencing this production as a postmodern riff on a neoclassical text, Mitchell perceived in the Group’s strategies the same kind of experimental modernist investigation into subjectivity as preoccupied Virginia Woolf. The question then arises, if The Wooster Group’s techniques led Mitchell deeper into dramatic character, into
whose particular subjectivity was Mitchell’s Waves inviting spectators to delve?