Tipo de estudio

In Michael Billington’s two-star review (2006), he warned directors, “You ignore [Chekhov’s] instructions at your peril,” finding Mitchell’s production to be “directors theatre at its most indulgent in which the play, as Chekhov wrote it, is definitely not the thing”. It seemed that certain writers were more amenable to directorial intervention

than others, however, for in 1999 Billington had isolated for praise in her staging of The

Oresteia Mitchell’s “boldest stroke”: keeping the ghost of Iphigenia onstage throughout.

He saw this as “following Aeschylus” in demonstrating that “past actions echo and reverberate in the present,” indicating his receptiveness to Mitchell’s attempt to

materialise Idea Structure. But by the time of Women of Troy, a year after The Seagull,

Billington (2007b) condemned Mitchell as “an auteur whose signature is on every moment of a production”. Although her approach had certainly evolved in this period, these responses also reflect the idiosyncratic evaluative criteria against which critics measure fidelity to text – even across a single reviewer’s appraisals of the director’s work.

To add to the confusion Mitchell’s approach has elicited, Susannah Clapp

(2006a) found that The Seagull “gets into the dark corners of one of Chekhov’s trickiest

plays”. Indeed, critics of her productions have each, at their own peculiar points, turned from praising her ability to illuminate text to begin criticising her overbearing readings.

In this respect, the Financial Times reviewer Alastair Macaulay was ahead of the crowd.

Having steadily praised her previous work, things changed when he reviewed her

continuously, just as her depression mirrors his own struggles; in marrying Medvedenko (the man she initially rejects), we see her repeating the mistake of Polina, who settled for Shamrayev despite her love of Dorn; and after becoming a mother, Masha’s neglect for her child in Act 4 suggests her as a prototype Arkadina.

production of The Oresteia – so celebrated by Billington – and he accused Mitchell of

taking “unpardonable […] structural liberties” (1999) with Aeschylus’s play.61

Throughout the 2000s, he pronounced her work to be riddled with “Euro clichés” (2004; 2005; 2006a), deeming the director to regard the text as an “”inconvenient encumbrance” (2004).

It took some critics far longer to share Macaulay’s suspicions about Mitchell’s attitude towards authors, but when they did a word entered into circulation that expressed their strong distaste for her treatment of text. In Benedict’s (2006) review of

The Seagull he referred to Mitchell and Crimp as “arrogant” in their handling of

Chekhov, criticising a director and adapter partnership that De Jongh similarly judged to be “remarkable for arrogance and perversity” (2006). The following year, Mitchell’s

Women of Troy – in which she took an approach almost identical to her work on Iphigenia

at Aulis in 2004 – elicited criticism that seemed to be a delayed reaction to her handling

of Chekhov; whilst John Peter called it “director’s theatre at its most ignorant and arrogant” (2007), Charles Spencer (2007) described Mitchell’s “overweening arrogance” as a “speciality of mostly female directors” who attract a “devoted coterie of admirers”. Spencer also seemed to use his review to react to Nicholas Hytner’s interview comments

in The Times, earlier in the year, in which he described a correlation between hostile

critiques of female directors and the “dead white men” who “take up too many of the critics’ seats’ in British theatre” (Hoyle 2007). We see, then, that these reviews participate in larger narratives that are building over time, refuting Billington’s insistence, in his rebuttal of Hytner’s accusation, that critics “judge a production by the quality of what happens on stage” rather than the “prior reputation of the participants” (2007c). They

also reveal The Seagull as a turning point in terms of Mitchell’s British reception; despite

the personal eccentricities of individual reviewers, a dominant critical narrative about Mitchell’s work was gaining traction, and it related to her treatment of Chekhov.

61 _{His reaction may well reflect the fact that Macaulay read Classics (Latin and Greek) at}

Cambridge – as does his quibble about the cast’s pronunciations of Greek names Pylades, Zeus, Orestes and Aegisthus (Macaulay 1999).

In addressing what critics found so off-putting in Mitchell’s and Crimp’s version

of The Seagull, it is helpful to track the ways in which textual adaptation evolved over the

course of her Chekhov productions. In her Three Sisters, Mitchell laboured to help the

actors uncover references (to art, to authors, to places) in the nineteenth-century text and make them meaningful through research. Small adjustments crept into Nicholas Wright’s version of the play, commissioned for Mitchell’s production, intended to make those references resonate not just for the actors but also for a twenty-first century audience. As Angus Wright (Kulygin) recalled:

Mitchell has been less reverent than many directors are with Chekhov and has worked to find the parallels between Chekhov’s time and ours. If many of us now have no concept of who Lermontov is and why Solyony compares himself to the poet, then change it to Byron so the reference has a similar effect on the listener as a reference to Lermontov would have done in Moscow in 1901. (McDevitt 2003: 7)

These minor alterations became wholesale changes in Martin Crimp’s version of The

Seagull, commissioned for Mitchell’s 2006 production. In a two-pronged approach, Mitchell and Crimp worked on a linguistic and formal translation of Chekhov’s play, designed to render Chekov’s original more directly accessible to the perceptual

experience of twenty-first century spectators. In an article published by The Guardian

immediately prior to the production’s opening, Mitchell wrote:

Martin compared the process to renovating old paintings. Some people like looking at old paintings through the layers of grime that build up over the years and others like cleaning the grime away to reveal the colours afresh. Some like the freshness and others feel that it loses the authenticity of the work. We wanted to see the text renovated. (Mitchell 2006)

Jane Edwardes (2006), in her review of the production, responded by arguing: “There is a difference between scraping the varnish away from a classic and tearing holes in the canvas.” With so much of Chekhov’s text slashed away, she asserted that Mitchell’s production was hard to understand “for anyone who has not seen the play before”.

Paradoxically, Martin Crimp had seen translation as a way of solving “problems of comprehension” (Cracknell 2006: 7) that stood between Chekhov’s original and

modern spectators. He contributed an essay to the educational workpack for The Seagull

that explained his approach, using as a case study a line of Konstantin’s dialogue in which he describes his horrified reaction to 1895 mainstream theatre: “I run and run, like Maupassant ran from the Eiffel tower, which weighed on his brain with its vulgarity” (Cracknell 2006: 7).

Crimp anticipated that this line would raise a series of questions for those watching the play today, including: “Who is Maupassant? Why is the Eiffel Tower (if we know what it is) vulgar? […] What does ‘weighed on his brain’ mean? And what exactly is ‘vulgarity’?” (ibid: 7). This list reads like those formulated by Mitchell’s actors during her Facts and Questions exercise on the text (see Mitchell 2009: 143), showing the adapter to be engaged in the same analytical process that Mitchell developed for rehearsal. In addressing these questions, Crimp had discovered that Maupassant – widely read at this time in Russia – had thought of the recently built tourist destination (the Eiffel Tower) as “a piece of commercial and technological trash that threatened the highbrow position of traditional arts (novels, paintings etc.)” (Cracknell 2006: 7). Crimp’s solution:

I’ve taken another iconic art-work from round 1900 – Munch’s painting The

Scream – and used this to give an image – instant I hope – of Konstantin’s reaction to contemporary plays: “When I see people churn out the same theatrical clichés time after time after time after time, then I want to scream and

scream – like the man in Munch’s picture.” And hopefully by using the word ‘scream’ the audience immediately ‘sees’ which picture Konstantin is talking about. (ibid: 7-8)

Crimp found the issue of ‘vulgarity’ to be more problematic: “Who is more vulgar – the

contestants on Big Brother, or the members of the Royal Family? The work of The

National Theatre, or episodes of Little Britain or The Office? The arguments are difficult,

but the solution is simple. The word has been cut” (ibid: 8). Significantly, in sidestepping decisions that he feels are too heavily predicated on subjective valuation, Crimp begins making his own subjective choices about what audiences can and can’t handle. There are other questions raised by such an approach – not least the assumptions underpinning the referents that Crimp swaps-in to take the place of those he deems to have lost their

currency. Rather than an entirely new version that makes use of wholly contemporary

references, he selects analogous historical examples based on expectations about what contemporary educated audiences will recognise from the art history canon. That many of these exchanges went unremarked in reviews perhaps testifies to their success, but the creative choices being brought to bear on Crimp’s version of Chekov’s play pose a serious challenge in terms of the limits of renovation, and what constitutes re-writing.

A more noticeably controversial aspect of Mitchell and Crimp’s approach proved to be their attempt to stabilise the play’s literary form. Many reviewers discussed the consequences of the director and adapter’s decision to “reduc[e] the exposition, and cut the asides and soliloquies” (Crimp cited in Chekhov 2006 [1896]: 67). Most reviewers did so with reference to what Billington argued was the “bungled” delivery of the play’s last line, where Dorn announced Konstantin’s suicide to the whole room, rather than in an aside with Trigorin. In Billington’s eyes, making this choice “reduce[d]

one of drama’s great anti-climactic endings to melodrama” (2006).62

Again, Mitchell and Crimp’s pursuit of their stated intentions yielded the opposite effect. Crimp described how their rule about insisting on every character hearing everything spoken onstage was designed to “strip away some of the apparatus of nineteenth-century drama” (Chekhov 2006 [1896]: 67). Whereas Billington mourned the revival of melodrama, Mitchell was actually attempting to remove aspects of Chekhov’s naturalism that she found weren’t naturalistic enough.

As we saw earlier, her painstaking analysis of the Main Event around which to

focus each act of Three Sisters met resistance from what she called “expositional” sections

(Shevtsova 2006: 16). By the time she directed The Seagull, Mitchell had come to

understand such moments as indicative of an author sliding between literary forms. In collaboration with Crimp she began to clear away the “expositional” dialogue, which she regarded as novelistic, in order to more clearly reveal Chekhov’s dramatic structure.

A consequence of this approach is that Mitchell began to see Chekhov himself as standing in the way of his own drama; as she told Shevtsova, “He is difficult because he is not a playwright” (ibid: 15), a statement that she qualified by explaining:

He is not always formally accurate. He starts writing a play and it slides into a novel and then back into a play. I can show you the lines which I think should go because of that in many of his plays. It might just be my taste, but I really find some of them a bit crude for theatre, especially when people say things that they would only think. So I think it’s a good idea to have your scissors to hand when you’re about to direct Chekhov. (ibid: 15-16)

The formal instability that she perceives in Chekhov’s writing thus stems from her own developing definition of realism in terms of a phenomenology of perception. When his writing contradicts her understanding of the external reality of first person perception (when “characters say things that they would only think”), it is no longer “drama” in her eyes and needs to be cut. This thrusts to the fore the question of the director’s own

subjectivity, and the extent to which it shapes strategies of reading which, in the steps of her process outlined thus far, we have seen described in wholly objective terms. Indeed, the director herself points towards this issue when she concedes, “It might just be my taste.” Mitchell’s interest in the accurate representation of human behaviour – which was, to a large extent, influenced by her engagement with Chekhov’s multivalent textuality and the mode of phenomenological perception that she had discovered it supports – began to heavily determine her rules about literary form. It is thus the case that the lessons that Mitchell learnt from Chekhov began to work against Chekhov’s own writing in Mitchell’s process.

This potentially clarifies why some find her approach so antagonising. Mitchell’s language – in rehearsals and in interviews – is distinguished by a forensic analytical vocabulary that prioritises clarity, accuracy and objectivity. She positions the text as both the generator of the interpretation (through its Idea Structure) and the mediator when dealing with challenges from an actor, using it to defend her own decisions:

When affinities get in the way of the actor I tend to draw them back to the writer. The writer becomes the mediator. I say: ‘It is very interesting that you, as the actor, have this thought about your character, but what does the playwright

mean when he or she says  x’ and I refer them to a bit of the text. I could say:  ‘I

know you might find it distressing, but, unfortunately you are going to have to

absorb what is there in the play’ (Shevtsova 2009: 196).      

The director endorses a similar notion of the text’s power when she argues its ability to disclose significances beyond the ken of its writer. In identifying the ideas that writers were focusing on (consciously or unconsciously) as they wrote, Mitchell has devised

systems designed to reveal the play’s secrets. A detail in The Director’s Craft, relating to

I listed the images that appeared in the play and counted the number of times each one was used. Unexpectedly, the most recurrent image was children. When I asked Martin what he thought the most common image in the play was, he confidently said war, then ashtrays and, finally, aeroplanes. (2009: 46)

Mitchell also writes that once she presented her analytical findings to the writer, they triggered his own recognition. Confronted with this evidence Crimp realised that – unconsciously – he had “put the experience of children at the heart of the play” (ibid: 46). There is a strong sense here that Mitchell conceives of her work as penetrating to the authentic core of the text, unveiling robust insights defensible against the vagaries of subjective readings – and perhaps helping us understand why some shout so loudly that she has got it wrong. Through isolating and counting the “recurrent” and “common” images in Crimp’s play, Mitchell makes the hermeneutical move of establishing the experience at the play’s heart, seemingly without acknowledging that questions of methodology are themselves questions of hermeneutics. Does finding the frequency of a word in a text better reveal its thematic concerns than other strategies of reading? Many of the procedures to which Mitchell submits a text are circumscribed by perimeters that heavily shape their outcomes – for instance, her insistence that Main Events must involve every character.

We might, however, approach the issue from another angle and explore what Mitchell’s analytical strategies expose – namely, that all reading is an act of perception in which a subjectively grounded gaze begins to organise, and thus interpret, certain aspects of the text. Whereas most British theatre critics believe that texts encode a specific style of production, Mitchell develops new reading machines that point to the multiplicity of ways in which critical approaches might generate insights about a text, revealing surprising angles on familiar dramas. The tight – almost algorithmic – constraints of Mitchell’s procedures unfold rich interpretive possibilities for director and actors, and open up new perspectives for audiences. Mitchell is right to claim that her

reading of the text is rhetorically defensible, as it is built on an impressive foundation of

textual evidence. As in any literary criticism, the incontrovertible truth-value of an

interpretation is never what is at stake. Many critics can approach the same material from different points of view, gather different forms of evidence using different methodologies, and construct different, equally defensible arguments. However uncomfortable one might feel about Mitchell’s claims to an objective understanding of a writer’s conscious and unconscious vision, what is important to register is that her

conclusions about a text are always robust. Far from deserving the “auteur” label that

critics stereotypically use to describe work they see at best as tangentially related to a script, Mitchell’s productions emerge out of studied and rigorous engagement with their textual source, and in so doing they expose the fallacy at the heart of a critical culture which mistakes conventions that have accrued around canonical works for the texts themselves. De Jongh’s (2006) disgruntled rejection of Mitchell’s “itching urge to interfere” with Chekhov is guilty of the same critical myopia that asserts there is one, stable, authoritative Chekhov, and that denies that all acts of reading are, in fact, acts of interpretation.

However, this chapter concludes by looking at The Seagull and seeing how, using an

extensive foundation of textual evidence as its support, Mitchell’s steps of interpretation became bolder in ways other than guiding the audience through a complex dramaturgy. Indeed, this later work on Chekhov reveals a director in crisis – all the things that she is doing lead towards abandoning a Chekhovian frame. The building intensity of these productions pushed the conventional understanding of the director-text relationship to breaking point. The next section examines how Mitchell sought to make Idea Structures literally resonate in the bodies of spectators, and explores the limits of the Chekhovian path for Mitchell. Once she met these limits, Live Cinema offered her the only means of escape.