Katie Mitchell’s theatrical surgery

A happy coincidence during a recent trip to Berlin has allowed me to attend two shows by one of the most interesting of European directors – Katie Mitchell. The 52-year-old British director works mainly on French and German stages (The Guardian once even named her “the theatrical queen in exile”).

THE POTION

In the Schiller Theater, Katie Mitchell directed The Potion, an oratorio written by Swiss composer Frank Martin in 1938-41, based on modern translation of the medieval romance Tristan and Isolde.

The sad and passionate Martin’s music echoes World War Two. Set designer Lizzie Clachan marks this environment through the scenery – there is a house, wrecked in a bombing run, there is snow falling down from the ceiling, and a live fire, slowly fading in a metal bowl.

The oratorio’s choir is twelve female and male voices. The cast (clad in dark clothes, which matches any of the last eight decades of European history) acts as set workers when necessary, with all the essential items handy. The show offers a kind of theater in the theater: the troupe performs amid ruins – of a city? Of the civilization? They are ready to start here and now in order to break away from the all-present chaos. And once an act is required on stage, someone from the choir leaves to play their role and then comes back to entwine into the musical fabric. This theatrical mechanic opened to the audience creates an incredible immersion.

Oratorio is a static genre. However, Mitchell has found a solution to that, remarkable in its simplicity. She introduced a kind of object-sign lexicon. A white veil, an iron bed, a table, a couple of chairs, a long rope, a piece of cutlery, a knife, the potion in a glass, white sheets, a contrastingly bright purple dress; these things are combined and recombined through the actors’ actions (which are also subordinated to their own rhythmic basis) to form new meanings. Thus these spatial characters write line by line the history of Tristan and Isolde before our eyes: a love story against the war and death – an eternal story, reproduced in an ascetic high drama.

OPHELIA’S ROOM

Katie Mitchell’s Ophelia’s Room has premiered in the Schaubuehne theater. The conception is a bit challenging: to reconstruct Ophelia’s life behind the scenes of Hamlet. To write all the necessary remarks and dialogs, a dramatic writer Alice Birch was invited by Mitchell.

An impenetrable black cube stands on the stage. An inscription flashes on its side: “1. Abwehr” (“Defense”), then the cube rises, revealing a conventional room outlined by a relief contour of the walls, with a minimum set of furniture. The cube will devour this space five more times, and each time except the last, an inscription will appear to signify the name of the next episode: Bated breath / Fainting / Agony / Clinical death.

Though the walls are just outlined, they are impenetrable. The only way out into the reality of Hamlet is the door to the back of the stage. Yet another door is at a distance, in a separate compartment behind the glass; the key to that door belongs to men – Polonius and Hamlet. They appear in that compartment regularly, indicating the developments of the outside world: loud remarks spoken into a microphone, doors slamming, locks clicking; Mitchell has similarly designed the sound of Yellow Wallpaper (see review on it in The Day’s issue No. 47 of August 19, 2013).

The reality from the outside of the room comes to Ophelia (played by Jenny Koenig) like that: in playbacks of birds singing and street noises; in voices, modified by the sound engineer; in Hamlet’s monologs, recorded on tape cartridges, which are brought to her in special envelopes.

In this space the protagonist is limited to a repeated set of actions: wake up; smile to invisible birds; throw another bouquet of flowers brought by a servant to the trash; do some embroidery; read a book; quickly get dressed and go when the father calls; return; listen to another letter from Hamlet; fall asleep. This routine activity is rhythmically bound by the changes in lighting: it becomes cold white, unsettling.

At first, Hamlet acts indirectly through cassettes; then, in full compliance with Shakespeare, he bursts into the room, grabs Ophelia by her hands and turns on the tape recorder to perform a convulsive dance to a song of despair and alienation “Love will tear us apart again” of the British band Joy Division, whose leader Ian Curtis killed himself at 25.

The world of Ophelia is a life under someone else’s control (“She Lost Control” is another famous song by Joy Division; similar motives are driving in the abovementioned Yellow Wallpaper). In this sense, Mitchell and Birch follow the spirit of Hamlet: after all, there the character is only portrayed as an object of someone else’s manipulation. The control is devastating: the beginning of the end is set by the second and final appearance of Hamlet, who is carrying the bloodied corpse of Polonius.

The traditional psychological “transformation” in every Mitchell’s work is opposed by Brecht’s alienation effect; the true feelings arise from precise plastic movements. Ophelia begins to lose her shape – physical and mental – very clearly. She does not remove her dresses, wearing a new one on top of the old; it looks like as if her body swells and becomes awkward to move, any signs of joy are erased from her. She hides under the bed, but she cannot disappear from this room. A bald gentleman in glasses with lips tightly compressed, who resembles a character of worst nightmares about punitive psychiatry and intelligence services, appears from the outside and pumps the character up with psychotropic drugs. He assures her that no murder has ever happened, that it was only a vision and she should calm down. The room is being filled with water little by little, and no one but Ophelia notices it.

There will be no happy ending. The protagonist cuts her throat open and falls, agonizing, into the water. There are no flowers, no pictorial drift downstream in a wide dress. Agony / Death. For a moment, the black cube is replaced with glass walls, which separate this terrible staging from the spectators to make Ophelia an object for the last time – this time, she is an object of contemplation, similar to the characters of the creepy paintings by Francis Bacon. And then finally, without any inscriptions, the blackness descends.

The control lost her. At the cost of a life.

P.S. SURGERY

Katie Mitchell’s judgment can be full of love or ruthless, but there is always the infallibility of a born surgeon; even by causing pain it heals.