ON PAPER the director Katie Mitchell is a pretty scary customer. She’s famous for staging the gloomiest writers — Strindberg, Beckett, Pinter, Genet, Chekhov, Greek tragedy. A serious director for serious theatregoers.
Born in 1964, she began directing at school, and then at Oxford where she soon made a name for herself as a director. After Oxford, where Patrick Marber was a contemporary, she set up her company, Classics on a Shoestring, doing heavyweight drama on the Fringe. Death, suffering, power, politics and war have been her bag ever since.
No surprise then that when asked to direct Shakespeare for the RSC, she picked the obscure Henry VI Part 3 and turned the savagery of the Wars of the Roses into a chilling comment on the horrors of Bosnia and Rwanda.
Five years ago she staged Aeschylus’ Oresteia — the amazing Ted Hughes version — at the National Theatre. Now she’s back there with Iphigenia at Aulis — Euripides’ savagely ironic play about how Agamemnon slits his daughter’s throat as a sacrifice in exchange for a fair wind for his becalmed fleet on their way to Troy. It’s Abraham and Isaac without the happy ending.
Mitchell is, I had gleaned, cagey about her personal life and I was expecting a grudging interview with an unsmiling ascetic. Not a bit of it. As we sat in the National’s John Gielgud reception suite, the room was alive with uproarious laughter — mostly hers.
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With her thin figure and swept-back hair, she was once described as a “haunted ballerina”. “What’s that all about?” she says, in amused puzzlement at the daft things journalists write. She’s been compared with Jonathan Miller, which is ridiculous — she’s far more attractive and about half his age.
But there is something extreme about her methods. She has been known to conduct rehearsals by candlelight. She also researches obsessively. For Strindberg she went walkabout in Sweden, for Ibsen she did Norway, and for the Oresteia she traced the path of the demented Orestes up and down Greece. For Iphigenia, however, she went no further than the library. And she has yet to see Troy, the new Hollywood epic with Brad Pitt.
“I am so looking forward to it,” she says with a laugh. “There is no Cassandra or Hecuba apparently, and there is a sentimental thing where Achilles goes off with some bird.” Several birds, actually, if you include the naked ones strewn over Pitt’s goatskin duvet in the first reel.
“That Troy has come out will make a difference,” she says, talking about audience familiarity with the story. “But that’s less to do with any interest among the young in Greek plays and more to do with epics like The Lord of the Rings.”
It’s the second time she’s been drawn to the play, in the late Don Taylor’s superb translation, having previously staged it at the Abbey in Dublin. So what’s it all about?
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“Well, I suppose there are three big themes in the play: power, family and war. Power is the big idea of the play, and self-interest is the nub of the matter.
“All the male political leaders act out of self-interest. It seems a good play to do now. It’s not necessary to set it in the present to have that conversation about America and the war in Iraq. Audiences are clever. If I set this in togas and masks they’d know why we were doing it.”
She’s actually setting the play in a modern war context — the Thirties and Forties — with a Chorus of worthy and patriotic English matrons who watch as the horrors unfold. Iphigenia’s sacrifice, to the naked horror of her mother, Clytemnestra, sets up the prequel to the terrible revenge killings of the Oresteia.
For this production, Mitchell invited General Sir Michael Rose, the former commander of the UN Protection Force in Bosnia, to a preview to pick his brains. The general’s book, Fighting for Peace, was one of Mitchell’s inspirations (see right).
“He was mostly there as an observer,” says Mitchell. “He enjoyed it and said that the actors occasionally needed to boom more. For my part, it was fascinating being around a proper general: he’s a big man in every way. That sense of physical presence is very relevant when you’re dealing with a play about war leaders.” But aside from the thrill of making some ancient anti-war statement relevant to today, it seems fair to ask why Mitchell is drawn to such depressing plays — the killing of a child is the play’s big event — which must be so emotionally draining to rehearse: “It’s not that I’m a gloomy person. I just like big ideas, and comedies perhaps have fewer big ideas.”
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All the more curious that this daughter of a dentist, raised near Newbury in Berkshire, has music hall in her blood. Her great-grandparents married between matinee and evening shows. He was with the fledgeling Charlie Chaplin, part of Fred Karno’s comedy troupe. She was a Tiller Girl.
“Chaplin was a bastard, that’s what my granny used to say,” recalls their great-granddaughter. “He used to pinch the bums of the Tiller Girls. My great-grandfather went with Chaplin and Karno on their South African tour. But he didn’t go to America, and I think suffered for the rest of his life wondering: what if?”
None of this Light Ent heritage emerges much in her work. “That music-hall background doesn’t make me want to do a variety show, if that’s what you mean,” she beams. “Although the chorus do the foxtrot in Iphigenia.
“The thing is, I still can’t believe that people pay me to do the work I want to do. I think one day there’ll be this hand on my shoulder saying, ‘Oh sweetie, it’s not working is it?’ and I’ll have to go and work in a bookshop.”