Katie Mitchell

Written by one of the UK’s most respected working directors, this book is a practical guide to directing in theatre and includes specific advice on every aspect of working with actors, designers, and the text.

Katie Mitchell: Beautiful Illogical Acts offers the first comprehensive study of Britain’s most internationally recognised, influential, and controversial theatre director. It examines Mitchell’s innovations in fourth-wall realism, opera, and Live Cinema across major British and European institutions, bringing three decades of practice vividly to life. Informed by first-hand rehearsal observations and in-depth conversations with the director and her collaborators, Fowler investigates the intense and immersive qualities of Mitchell’s distinctive theatrical realism and challenges mainstream narratives about realism as a defunct or inherently conservative genre. He explores Mitchell’s theatre—and its often polarised reception—to question familiar assumptions governing contemporary performance criticism, including common binaries that pit realism against radical experimentation, auteurs against texts, feminists against Naturalism, and Britain against Europe. By examining a career trajectory that intersects with huge cultural change, Fowler places Mitchell at the centre of urgent contemporary debates about cultural transformation and its genuinely inclusive potential. This is an essential book for those interested in Katie Mitchell, British theatre, directing, the transformative power of realism and feminism in contemporary theatre practice, and challenges to hierarchical distributions of power inside the mainstream.

Katie Mitchell: Beautiful Illogical Acts offers the first comprehensive study of Britain’s most internationally recognised, influential, and controversial theatre director. It examines Mitchell’s innovations in fourth-wall realism, opera, and Live Cinema across major British and European institutions, bringing three decades of practice vividly to life. Informed by first-hand rehearsal observations and in-depth conversations with the director and her collaborators, Fowler investigates the intense and immersive qualities of Mitchell’s distinctive theatrical realism and challenges mainstream narratives about realism as a defunct or inherently conservative genre. He explores Mitchell’s theatre—and its often polarised reception—to question familiar assumptions governing contemporary performance criticism, including common binaries that pit realism against radical experimentation, auteurs against texts, feminists against Naturalism, and Britain against Europe. By examining a career trajectory that intersects with huge cultural change, Fowler places Mitchell at the centre of urgent contemporary debates about cultural transformation and its genuinely inclusive potential. This is an essential book for those interested in Katie Mitchell, British theatre, directing, the transformative power of realism and feminism in contemporary theatre practice, and challenges to hierarchical distributions of power inside the mainstream.

This first volume in the 4x45 series investigates the work of theatre director Katie Mitchell. Pausing to reconsider a career in progress, it engages with some of Mitchell’s most recent work in the UK and Europe across theatre, opera, and Live Cinema. It also takes a longer view, considering the early turns that Mitchell took at the start of her career in the late 1980s. This volume gives full scope to the voice of the practitioner, alongside scholarly perspectives, in order to understand the work from within. Interviews with Mitchell’s collaborators get inside her process – and inside the thinking of key artists who help craft the distinctive visual, aesthetic and technological forms of Mitchell’s productions. Three major concerns criss-cross these contributions: the political implications of aesthetic form; the meaning of Mitchell’s interest in the radical project of early Naturalism; and the influence of Europe on Mitchell’s avant-garde experimentalism, which often draws on technology to open up new modes of perception and experience. An accessible and encompassing examination of one of Europe's most celebrated theatrical talents, 4x45 | The Theatre of Katie Mitchell is a unique resource for scholars,students and practitioners of Theatre Studies, Performance and Directing.

This expanded second edition of Contemporary European Theatre Directors is an ambitious and unprecedented overview of many of the key directors working in European theatre over the past 30 years. This book is a vivid account of the vast range of work undertaken in European theatre during the last three decades, situated lucidly in its artistic, cultural, and political context. Each chapter discusses a particular director, showing the influences on their work, how it has developed over time, its reception, and the complex relation it has with its social and cultural context. The volume includes directors living and working in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Russia, Romania, the UK, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, offering a broad and international picture of the directing landscape. Now revised and updated, Contemporary European Theatre Directors is an ideal text for both undergraduate and postgraduate directing students, as well as those researching contemporary theatre practices, providing a detailed guide to the generation of directors whose careers were forged and tempered in the changing Europe following the end of the Cold War.

Immersive worlds: designing Katie Mitchell's theatre / Alex Eales in conversation with Benjamin Fowler -- Katie Mitchell and the politics of naturalist theatre / Dan Rebellato and Kim Solga -- Willful distraction: Katie Mitchell, auteurism and the canon / Tom Cornford -- Stages and screens: Katie Mitchell's theatre aesthetics / Leo Warner in conversation with Janis Jefferies

"In 2006 Katie Mitchell and her collaborators devised an original work for the National Theatre which seamlessly transposed the pointillist vision of Virginia Woolf's experimental novel The Waves into an entirely new form. The intertwining narrative of six friends - from childhood to maturity and beyond - was rendered into a series of beautiful and poignant images onto a screen by live actors and musicians incorporating techniques taken from the theatre, radio and video production." "The book combines the text used from Woolf's novel with the corresponding images in order to create a record of the production, and a work of art in its own right."--BOOK JACKET.

A Director Prepares is a thought-provoking examination of the challenges of making theatre. In it, Anne Bogart speaks candidly and with wisdom of the courage required to create 'art with great presence'. Each chapter tackles one of the seven major areas Bogart has identified as both potential partner and potential obstacle to art-making. They are Violence; Memory; Terror; Eroticism; Stereotype; Embarrassment; and Resistance. Each one can be used to generate extraordinary creative energy, if we know how to use it. A Director Prepares offers every practitioner an extraordinary insight into the creative process. It is a handbook, Bible and manifesto, all in one. No other book on the art of theatre comes even close to offering this much understanding, experience and inspiration.